CICS® provides two programs for processing any CICS monitoring data that is written to system management facilities (SMF) data sets. These two programs are:
This section describes the steps required to unload monitoring data from SMF data sets, for one or more CICS regions, and print the data using the DFH$MOLS sample utility program, or a utility program of your own modelled on the DFH$MOLS sample program.
The job steps involved in processing CICS monitoring data are:
The DFH$MOLS program is a data reduction program designed to produce reports from the data collected by the CICS monitoring domain (MN), and written to SMF data sets.
The CICS Transaction Server for z/OS®, Version 3 Release 1 release of DFH$MOLS can process SMF 110 monitoring data records for earlier CICS Transaction Server versions and releases, and for CICS/ESA Version 4 and CICS/ESA Version 3. However, any version or release of DFH$MOLS cannot process monitoring data for a version or release later than itself, so you should always use the DFH$MOLS from the highest version or release available to you. See Sample job stream for DFH$MOLS for information on processing CICS/MVS SMF records.
You run the DFH$MOLS program in a batch region to process any CICS SMF type 110 monitoring records that are present in an unloaded SMF data set, which you can write to either a temporary or cataloged data set. You can determine the scope of the report(s) by supplying control statements in the SYSIN data set.
You can specify a sort option for the selected data. The DFH$MOLS program sorts the data by means of a link to the MVS™ sort program, DFSORT, passing parameters to the sort, and using the sort exits E15 and E35. You can use any standard sort utility provided it has these E15 and E35 exits. For further information about the DFSORT program, see the DFSORT Application Programming Guide.
The program reads, formats, and prints the CICS monitoring data, which is packaged in the following format:
[SMF HEADER].[SMF PRODUCT SECTION].[CICS DATA SECTION]
The CICS data section in a monitoring record is one of the following:
For programming information about the structure of CICS SMF type 110, and how the monitoring data is packaged within the SMF records, see the CICS Customization Guide. The DFH$MOLS program reads the SMF data and formats and prints it. If you want to analyze the data using your own routines, this is the point at which you can link to a user-written analysis program.
The DFH$MOLS program prints about one page per task, so take care to specify only those items that you need using the DFH$MOLS program control statements. For details of the selection options, see Control statements of DFH$MOLS -- overview.
Note that the DFH$MOLS program requires a performance dictionary record to process monitoring performance data. When it locates a dictionary record, it builds an in-store dictionary and processes the subsequent (if any) performance data using this dictionary. Whenever it reads a new dictionary record, the current dictionary is released and a new in-store dictionary is built. The dictionary record must appear before any related performance data, otherwise the DFH$MOLS program abends. Note that monitoring exception records do not require a dictionary and so they can precede the first dictionary record and still be successfully processed. For more information about performance dictionary records, see Generating a performance dictionary record using DFHMNDUP.