CICS Alerting for transactions that fall of the ICE Chain

Products

• SYSVIEW Performance Management

Issue/Introduction

We have a transaction that, during the day, runs every 30 seconds.  It is put on the ICE chain when the region starts up and continues to run for the life of the region.  

Every once in a while, an issue will cause the transaction to fall off the ICE chain.  This may not be discovered for several hours when the records that are supposed to be processed start to back up.  

Is there a way that we can set an alert to check for the last time this transaction has run?  If it's greater than say 5 minutes, create a warning to check on the 'missing' transaction?

 

Resolution

There is no CICS ICE variable to focus on to get this information. However, SYSVIEW can monitor and generate an Alert for when the ICE transaction falls off the chain.  The below actions will enable an alert to be generated when the transaction falls off:   

For SYSVIEW R17.0:

Execute the RULES command and FIND TSUMRATE.   This will show the metric CICS_TSUM_Rate.  (NOTE: in prior releases the metric name was just TSUMRATE).  Edit this metric to set the threshold rate, (attributes), the RsceScope and RsceName, and RsceQual and RsceAttr fields, as needed.   The PF1 Help screen is valuable for knowing how to set these.   Then set Rule Type to LOWER, and use the WARNING LIMIT and PROBLEM LIMIT fields to 0.   

 

For SYSVIEW R16.0 and prior releases:

From Sysview on the CTHRESH screen, you can set a threshold for TSUMRATE, specifying the CICS region(s) being monitored and a resource name of the ICE transaction (ie:CEMT, CESF, etc..). The Ruletype would be LOWER, and the LIMIT and WARNING should be set to reflect 0.