Application Grouping

Application Grouping enables you to create form-based performance reports or extracts that relate data to logical business units or functions known as Applications. In this context, an Application is a name that you associate with a set of performance data field values. For example, you can associate the Application name "Accounting" with the CICS® transaction ID (TRAN) field values DEPT, WDRW, and ACC* (that is, matching any transaction ID beginning with the characters ACC). Then you can create reports or extracts that refer to the performance data for those transaction IDs as belonging to the "Accounting" Application.

To use Application Grouping, you need to follow these steps:

  1. Define an Application Group using option 8 Resource Definitions from the CICS PA Primary Option Menu.

    An Application Group consists of one or more Applications that you want to present together, in a single report or extract. Before adding Applications to an Application Group, you must specify a performance data field, such as CICS transaction ID (TRAN), whose values will define the Applications. This is known as the resource field for the Application Group. All Applications in an Application Group refer to values of the same resource field. The resource field can be any character user field (defined in an MCT) or one of a limited set of predefined CMF character fields.

    Each Application consists of a name and a set of resource field values that you want to associate with that Application name. You can either specify these values individually, or you can refer to a Resource List that contains the values. If you want to define the same Application in several Application Groups, then rather than specifying its field values separately in each Application Group, consider defining and referring to a Resource List.

    For more information, see Defining Application Groups.

  2. Add the Application Group to a Report Form using option 3 Report Forms from the CICS PA Primary Option Menu:
    1. Insert a new field in the Report Form
    2. In the Field Name column, enter the Application Group name
    3. In the Type column, enter APG

    Report Forms are independent of repositories (where Application Groups are stored), so CICS PA does not validate that the Application Group name that you enter has been defined. For details on editing a Report Form, see Specifying Report Form contents.

  3. Use the Report Form to create a report or an extract using one of the following options from the CICS PA Primary Option Menu:
    • Option 2 Report Sets, to create a report or an extract from SMF files. For details, see Report Sets.

      or

    • Option 5 Historical Database, to create a report or an extract from an HDB. For details, see Using the HDB dialog.

      or

    • Option 7 Profiling, to create a Transaction Profiling report. For details, see Transaction Profiling report.

The Application Group name appears in the report or extract as a column heading. If a row of data matches a resource field value specified by an Application in the Application Group, the column displays the Application name. For example, you might define an Application Group named CRITICAL that consists of your mission-critical Applications, where each Application is defined by a set of transaction IDs.

Application Grouping is especially useful for summarizing the performance of Applications that involve several transaction IDs. If you specify an Application Group as a key field in a SUMMARY Report Form, the report or extract groups and then summarizes the input records for each Application. If you specify TRAN as a key field after the Application Group, then, after the summary for each Application, the report or extract shows summaries for each transaction ID of that Application. For example, suppose you have associated the Application name "Application A" with transaction IDs matching the masked value A* (that is, transaction IDs beginning with the character A):

                                  Avg
CRITICAL                     Response
Group          Tran  #Tasks      Time
Application A  A1         4     .0500
Application A  A2         3     .0200
Application A  A3         5     .0700
Application A            12     .0508 (combined summary for A1, A2, and A3)
Application B  B1 …

By contrast, adding an Application Group to a LIST Report Form simply adds a column to the resulting report or extract, annotating each row with the associated Application name, with the same number of report lines as before: it does not perform any grouping or sorting.

Typically, you use Application Grouping to group input records for Applications based on CICS transaction IDs, as shown in the previous example. However, you can also use Application Grouping to group input records for other purposes, based on other performance fields. For example, you could define an Application Group where each "Application" is defined by the set of user IDs in a division of your enterprise. You can use this Application Group to track CICS usage patterns of staff in each division.

For examples of reports that use Application Grouping, see Figure 4 and Figure 13.


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Timestamp icon Last updated: Thursday, 7 November 2013


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