CICS considerations
Before you run the installation jobs that enable your CICS® regions to collect CICS IA data, you must consider and resolve the following questions.
- In which CICS regions do I want to collect CICS IA data?
- In which types of CICS regions should I collect CICS IA data?
- In which one CICS region can I administer and operate CICS IA?
- Do I want to collect DB2® command in this CICS region?
- Do I want to use the Command Flow collector?
- Application owning regions (AORs).
- Data Owning regions (DORs, FORs, TSQueue owning regions).
- Terminal Owning regions.
- The dependency collector
- The affinity collector
- The command flow collector
The Dependency Collector captures data on the commands and resources that are used by a Transaction and Program in the CICS region. Application programs are typically run in AORs, so it makes sense to enable CICS IA in your AORs at the start.
- Which CICS regions use the FILE resource PAYFILE?
- Which DB2 tables are used by my CICS regions?
- Which TSQUEUEs are used by my CICS regions?
The affinity collector captures information that you can use to proceed with deploying CPSM Workload Management. The affinity collector helps identifying transactions that must remain in the same CICS regions as it started because it has an affinity to that region. If you are planning to clone an application region and use CPSM WLM to manage the work across these regions, you must enable CICS IA in this region.
The command flow collector captures information about all the commands that are issued by your CICS tasks, in chronological order. The command flow collector can capture information from the start of a transaction in a TOR, the commands that are issued by your application in the AOR. When you activate the command flow collector you can choose which regions to start the collector in, you must enable CICS IA in all of those regions.
If you are using cloned regions, you might want to consider enabling CICS IA in one or two of these regions, but not all your cloned regions. The data that you collect ought to be the same. You might think that these regions are exact clones, however, by collecting CICS IA data in two different clones you can view and compare which resources and commands are being used.