SMF Type 110 CICS Transaction Records
Acquire will record and summarize details for every CICS transaction presented to it in SMF type 110 records that it can decode either with the use of dictionary records (see below), or by an internal dictionary facility (only for later versions of CICS), unless the record is malformed in some way, e.g., if key internal pointers within the record contain zeros.
By default, CICS transactions are summarized in three ways in the Acquire output file:
By transaction name
By terminal ID
By CICS user ID
Records are written for each output interval, and are also stored this way in the Capacity Database. This is a design choice to minimize the Capacity Database space and update requirements for storing and reporting on CICS data.
It is therefore not possible to determine individual CICS transaction details, only the average or total of metrics such as internal response times, wait times, CPU times or file activity.
A parameter of CICSOPTS=xyz controls which of the summarized data types will be written to the Acquire output file. All three of the operands must be provided and each must be either Y or N. The operands control summarization by:
Transaction name (x)
Terminal ID (y)
User ID (z)
For legacy purposes the default is CICSOPTS=YYY. For example, to suppress Terminal ID and User ID data you can specify CICSOPTS=YNN - this is how many customers choose to run CICS data collection.
There is also a choice to be made regarding the timestamp that you want to associate with CICS transaction data. There are three options. You can associate a transaction with:
The time it started, or
The time it ended, or
The time that the SMF record was written by CICS.
See the CICSTIME= control card in Acquire parameter specifications.
For compatibility with previous versions of Acquire the default is set to D, to set the date and time for all CICS transactions from the SMF record that contains them.
Consider the following example:
A z/OS system has an SMF interval time of 10 minutes.
A CICS transaction started at 09:59:30 and ended at 10:00:15.
This is a very lightly loaded system and the SMF type-110 record containing information about this transaction was not written until 10:11:00.
If you specify CICSTIME=S, the transaction will be accounted for in the time slot 09:50 - 10:00
If you specify CICSTIME=E (the default), it will be accounted for in the time slot 10:00 - 10:10
If you specify CICSTIME=D, it will be accounted for in the time slot 10:10 - 10:20