The Command Flow Feature

The Command Flow feature enables you to capture all EXEC CICS®, SQL, MQ and IMS™ calls in chronological order.

With the Command Flow Feature you can trace the command flow in up to five transactions in chronological order. A trace name can be associated with each instance of the trace. CICS IA uses a number of CICS Global User Exits (GLUEs) and a CICS Task Related User Exit (TRUE) to intercept commands. The command records are written to a CICS User Journal, which uses the MVS™ logger subsystem to write them to a log streams data set. At the end of a trace, a record containing the name, start time, end time, and the five possible transactions is written to the journal.

The data is read from the log stream data sets into a generation data set. The data in the generation data set is formatted to update the CIU_CMDFLOW_DATA and CIU_CMDFLOW_INDEX DB2® tables, or to create QSAM data sets with the data stored in the Comma Separated Value (CSV) format. See Figure 1.

Figure 1. Command Flow option structure