VSEMON ™ supports CICS

CICS data for z/OS and z/VSE are very similar. Since zVPS started supporting CICS on z/OS, it was very easy for us to also support CICS on z/VSE.

The primary objective of VSEMON is to provide full performance management at extremely low overhead. Including CICS in this suite met the same objective. Installations processing 100 transactions per second may not even notice any increase in the zVPS processing requirements.

We intercept the data that is collected by DMF (the CICS Data Management Facility) on z/VSE, and send it to z/VM. The same way that we send data to z/VM from z/OS.

CICS interval overhead

Velocity Software on all platforms has supported a one minute reporting interval for operational alerts and ease of performance analysis. In z/VSE, there is the DMF interval setting, and a CICS interval setting for providing statistics and for providing details on inflight transactions.

An analysis of effects of DMF indicates that it is negligible. The VSE job screen shows that DMFSTART is using 0.1% of the CPU. In this case while CICS is executing 7 transactions per second.

DMF can be configured to not write to the VSAM collection files. That can reduce some of the overhead.

The first screen shows the number of transactions in the interval. In this case 440, which is a little more than 7 transactions per second.

Screen: ZOSCIX2  Velocity Software - VSIVM4     ESAMON 5.121 08/10
1 of 2  CICS Transaction Analysis               SYSID V62B APPLID *
 
                                      <-Response Time-> <---Dispatch
                        Total  Susp  Disp   CPU   PC
Time    SYSID APPLID   Group    Count  Resp  Time  Time  Time  Load
-------- ---- -------- -------- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- -----
13:41:00 V62B CICSJA95 Totals     440 3.673 3.537 0.136 0.015     0

The next screen shows the DMF CPU Utilization.

Screen: ESAVSEJ  Velocity Software - VSIVM4     ESAMON 5.121
1 of 3  VSE Job/Step Performance                VSE ZVSE61B J
 
                  Part Job      Phase    <- CPU% ->
Time     Node       Id Name     Name       CPU Ovhd
-------- -------- ---- -------- -------- ----- ----
13:41:00 zvse61b    Z1 DMFSTART DFHDFSIP   0.1  0.0
13:40:00 zvse61b    Z1 DMFSTART DFHDFSIP   0.2  0.0