Taking a Strategic Approach to CICS Transactions with Rocket C\Prof

January 3, 2024

Transactions today happen in the blink of an eye, making the reliability and efficiency of underlying processes more critical than ever. Various back-end functions like card transaction processing for retailers or applications to create various insurance policies depend heavily on the robustness of the Customer Information Control System (CICS) transactions. Any disruption in these processes can not only lead to dissatisfied customers but also expose enterprises to significant financial losses and cause them to miss out on valuable cost savings.

The Importance of CICS Transactions

CICS transactions underpin payment card transactions and are the backbone of the operations driving major industries like insurance, banking, and retail among others. An outage in any one of these systems could wind up costing businesses millions of dollars in lost time and damage to their reputations. With the stakes so high, reducing the mean time to resolution becomes critical to minimizing the financial impact of delays or outages.

Introducing Rocket C\Prof: A Game-Changer for CICS Transaction Analysis

Rocket C\Prof is a solution designed to diagnose, visualize, and analyze problems in CICS applications swiftly and efficiently. Its key benefit lies in its ability to provide a faster alternative to existing tools, enabling organizations to spend less time sorting through diagnostic data and more time resolving issues.

One of the standout features of C\Prof is the ability to run outside of the CICS address space without requiring any changes to CICS itself, ensuring minimal impact on critical applications. The tool also offers trace information in an easy-to-read format, making it accessible to both seasoned systems programmers with more experience reading trace as well as application programmers with little or no experience with trace. Both sides can take full advantage, identifying and resolving problems much quicker.

A Unique Analytical Capability

Unlike traditional tools, C\Prof allows the analysis of individual CICS transactions across multiple CICS regions. This capability proves invaluable as transactions in CICS often run and produce results across multiple systems. By aggregating transaction data, C\Prof streamlines the diagnostic process, contributing to quicker problem resolution. C\Prof also facilitates the capture and analysis of problems in real time with point-in-time snapshots of CICS internal trace data, reducing the need to reproduce issues, resulting in faster resolutions and fewer repeat occurrences.

Empowering Application Engineers

Rocket C\Prof empowers application engineers to navigate trace data independently, reducing reliance on system administrators. This newfound efficiency allows system administrators to focus on other critical business needs, enhancing the overall effectiveness of the IT team.

Strategic Benefits of Leveraging Rocket C\Prof

Adopting Rocket C\Prof delivers a multitude of strategic benefits for businesses:

• Proactive Application Profiling: C\Prof offers program-level details, enabling organizations to prioritize remediation efforts effectively while also allowing for profiling of applications that exist in non-High Availability (HA) environment.
• Reduced System Outages: By swiftly identifying and resolving CICS-related issues, system outages are reduced, minimizing the impact on customers. This is crucial for business-critical applications such as payment card authorizations and withdrawals.
• Improved Testing and Modeling: C\Prof facilitates better modeling and testing of CICS transactions before production, reducing the likelihood of undetected issues during testing and potential business disruptions.
• Efficiency and Cost Reduction: The tool aids in engineering more efficient CICS transactions, leading to reduced machine processor consumption and a direct reduction in operating costs.
• Application Development Lifecycle Integration: Integrating C\Prof into the application development lifecycle ensures that application changes, including regulatory requirements, can be tested in advance, preventing outages or additional expenses due to code inefficiencies

Leveraging Rocket C\Prof is much more than just an investment in a tool; it is a strategic move towards enhancing customer satisfaction, improving application availability, increasing aggregate uptime, and ultimately, removing costs from the bottom line.

The tool's ability to prevent even a single CICS downtime event or reduce outage duration by a few minutes can result in significant cost savings, making it a valuable asset for any enterprise relying on CICS transactions.

Learn more about how Rocket C\Prof can help organizations modernize without disruption.