IBM OS manual Detector performance, Reporter component, Builder component

Detector performance

The Detector is intended to be run against production CICS regions. However, over the period when the Detector is running, the CICS region suffers a performance degradation (dependent on the workload and number of affinities) equivalent to the performance impact of vendor monitor products that use the same user exits. The Detector is intended to be used over limited periods. To further limit the impact of running the Detector during periods of particularly heavy workloads, you can pause or stop the collection of data, or select speci®c commands or transactions to search for.

If your naming convention for TS queues uses a unique counter as part of the name, the Detector performance is likely to be worse than described above. This is because if every TS queue created has a unique name, the Detector creates a very large number of affinity records, which adversely affects performance.

The most likely reason for poor performance is the detection of TS commands. You may prefer to run the Detector twice, once for TS commands and once for all other affinity commands.

The Reporter component

The Reporter is a batch utility that you can use to convert the affinity data collected by the Detector into two output formats:

vA report presenting the affinity data in a readable form

This is intended for use by system programmers and application designers, and indicates the transactions and programs issuing the EXEC CICS commands that cause inter-transaction and transaction-system affinities. This information should help you understand the transactions making up the workload, and should highlight the changes you need to make to remove unwanted affinities.

vA ®le containing a set of basic affinity transaction group de®nitions in a syntax approximating to the batch API of CICSPlex SM

This is intended as input to the Builder, which can merge these basic groups into the combined groups suitable for input to CICSPlex SM.

The input to the Reporter is the three ®les of affinity data from a single CICS region. The output from the Reporter therefore describes the affinities detected in a single CICS region.

Note: The output produced may not contain all the transaction affinities in the CICS region concerned, because some affinities may not have been found by the Detector. You may have to supplement the basic affinity transaction groups with information from the Scanner report, or from your own knowledge of your transactions, before using the ®le as input to the Builder.

The Builder component

The Builder is a batch utility that you can run against a set of ®les containing the basic affinity transaction group de®nitions as created by the Reporter. The Builder produces a ®le containing combined affinity transaction group de®nitions suitable for input to CICSPlex SM.

18 CICS Transaction Affinities Utility Guide