Enhance CICS Performance Monitoring with Rocket C\Prof: Issue Detection (Part 1)
April 17, 2023
For more than half a century, IBM CICS has been used to process high volumes of transactions and power mission-critical applications at large organizations around the globe. Most major banks and financial institutions still rely on CICS to handle banking transactions and credit card processing— a factor that makes resolving CICS performance issues critically important. Typically, organizations follow a three-step process to address CICS problems:
- Detect any potential issues.
- Confirm their existence.
- Take the necessary steps to resolve them.
This blog post kicks off a three-part series that will explore how to enhance CICS performance monitoring with modern tools at each phase of the CICS problem detection, confirmation, and resolution process. To start, let’s look at how to better detect potential issues with CICS.
Enhance CICS Performance Monitoring
While most organizations follow the three-step process outlined above for detecting, confirming, and resolving CICS issues, the changing landscape of technology, and the shrinking pool of CICS skills, compels organizations to infuse tools that reduce dependence on CICS expertise and meet modern standards of usability.
Enter Rocket® C\Prof, an IBM CICS transaction profiling solution that fits neatly into the overall CICS issue resolution process, complementing established tools like Rocket TMON for CICS TS and Rocket TMON PA—part of the Rocket TMON ONE family—as well as IBM OMEGAMON for CICS and IBM CICS Performance Analyzer (CICS PA).
One of the key benefits of C\Prof is that it does not demand deep CICS expertise from support personnel, making it easier for organizations to source and train support staff.
In this blog series, we will explore how C\Prof simplifies the issue resolution process and helps organizations tackle CICS performance issues with confidence. Let’s start with CICS issue detection.
CICS Issue Detection
To address CICS performance issues, the first step is to know whether there is an issue at all. This is where real-time monitoring tools come into play.
Mainframe and CICS performance monitoring tools provide a lot of useful data, such as transaction rates, CPU usage, and resource utilization for different CICS regions. Some tools even provide capabilities that allow users to use colors to highlight areas that require attention, such as regions with high CPU usage.
Additionally, monitoring tools often provide alerts that can be set up to monitor system performance and metrics like CPU or storage usage and notify users when specific thresholds are exceeded, or events occur.
Looking Beyond Proactive CICS Monitoring
By proactively monitoring performance issues in this way, organizations can maintain business continuity and avoid downtime. But detecting issues is only the first step. Next in this blog series, we will dive into why CICS problem confirmation is a crucial next step.
Ready to learn more? Find out what Rocket® C\Prof can do for your business.
