CICS® IA interdependency functions

CICS® IA assists in understanding, in a controlled manner, the inter relationships between the shared common resources of applications and services.

As organizations grow, their systems often evolve in response to new functionalities, corporate standards, technical requirements, and business pressures. This ongoing evolution can lead to a complex web of interdependencies where applications and services share common resources. Consequently, changes in one area can have widespread effects on others. When system growth is unstructured, it can become challenging to manage and develop without fully understanding these relationships. CICS® IA provides the insights to understand and manage these interdependencies, allowing for more controlled and efficient system development.

For example, to change the content or structure of a file, you must know which programs use this file, because they will need to be changed. CICS® IA can identify the programs and the transactions that drive the programs.

CICS® IA records the interdependencies between resources, such as files, programs, and transactions, by monitoring programming commands that operate on resources. The application that issues such a command has a dependency on the resource named in the command. For example, if an application program issues the command EXEC CICS® WRITE FILE myfile it has a dependency on the file called myfile. It might have similar dependencies on transient data queues, temporary storage queues, transactions, and other programs.

The commands that are monitored are typically CICS® application programming interface (API) and system programming interface (SPI) commands that operate on CICS® resources. However, you can also instruct CICS® IA to monitor some types of commands that operate on resources that are not CICS®. For example:
  • EXEC CPSM calls to CICSPlex® SM resources
  • EXEC SQL calls to Db2® resources
  • MQ calls to IBM MQ resources
  • EXEC DLI calls and language-dependent native calls to IMS® Database resources
  • Dynamic COBOL calls to other programs
Potentially, the inclusion of any non-CICS resources gives you a fuller picture of the resources used by a transaction.

All the CICS® and non-CICS commands that can be monitored are listed in Details of dependencies and affinities collected.

The Collector component of CICS® IA collects the dependencies that apply to a single CICS® region; that is, a single application-owning region (AOR) or a single, combined routing region and AOR. It can be run against production CICS® regions and is also useful in a test environment, to monitor possible dependencies introduced by new or changed application suites or packages. From the interactive interface of CICS® IA, you can control Collectors running on multiple regions.

Note:
To ensure that you monitor as many potential dependencies as possible, use CICS® IA with all parts of your workload, including rarely used transactions and abnormal situations.

CICS® IA collects these dependencies into a database. You can store the dependency information from several CICS® regions into the same database.

You can review the collected dependencies using the CICS® IA Query interface, or list them using the Reporter.

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