CICS IA affinity related functions

The affinity related functions of CICS® IA help users of CICS dynamic routing, who need to determine whether any of the transactions in their CICS applications use programming techniques that require them to be run in the same region thus creating an inter-transaction affinity, or in a particular region, thus creating a transaction-system affinity. Application programmers can use CICS IA to detect whether the programs they are developing are likely to cause transaction affinities.

The affinity-related functions of CICS IA work in a similar way to the interdependency functions, by collecting information about programs and transactions that issue specific commands, but in this case the objective is to detect affinities rather than interdependencies.

CICS IA detects possible affinities by monitoring those EXEC CICS commands that have the potential to create them. All the CICS API and SPI commands that might create affinities and can be monitored are listed in Affinity-related commands.

The Collector component of CICS IA collects the affinities 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 affinities introduced by new or changed application suites or packages.

The CINT transaction provides an interactive interface with which to control the Collector.

Note: To ensure that you monitor as many potential affinities as possible, run the Collector against all parts of your workload, including rarely used transactions and abnormal situations.

The affinity data collected by the Collector is stored in data tables in a data space. When you stop the Collector and, optionally, at predetermined intervals, the affinity data in the data space is saved to VSAM files by the CICS IA autosave transaction, CINB.

Using CICS IA, you can:
  • Collect data about potential affinities
  • Load the affinity data into DB2® databases
  • Use the Query interface to analyze the affinities data by means of SQL queries
  • Use the Load Module Scanner to check a load module library for programs that issue commands that might cause transaction affinities
  • Use the Affinities Reporter to produce detailed affinity reports
  • Use the Builder to create a file of affinity-transaction-group definitions suitable for input to CICSPlex® SM

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