The company services 5 million policyholders worldwide through a sales force of nearly 8,000 people throughout North America, Latin America, Europe and the Pacific. I get called when a performance problem arises, typically when tasks are hung or user response time has slowed down. We looked at a few different monitoring tools designed to provide a real-time view of CICS system operations. It offered the ability to not only identify problems quickly but to effect change, such as modifying memory areas to stop a looping program or pointing a terminal to a different printer. This saves time by making it possible to quickly scan a wide range of metrics, then quickly zero in to get more detailed information when a problem is detected.
Productivity is enhanced by the program's powerful exception and alert processing.
It lets me zero right in on the state of the system at the time the problem occurs. For example, if a program is looping with excessive database calls, I can often watch the database call parameters and responses change in working storage with each refresh of a screen. Usually, this gives me the real-time detail that I cannot get from a dump or trace. Also, I use task detail records of TMON for CICS's collection history facility to get a fix on recurring problems that are hard to pinpoint. It's really pretty simple.