Defining performance goals for MVS Workload Manager

You can define performance goals, such as internal response times, for CICS® (and other MVS™ subsystems that comprise your workload). As an alternative to defining your own goals, you can use "discretionary goals"--the workload manager decides how best to run work for which this type of goal is specified. You can define goals for:

Workload management also collects performance and delay data, which can be used by reporting and monitoring products, such as the Resource Measurement Facility (RMF™), Tivoli® Decision Support for z/OS®, or vendor products.

The service level administrator defines your installation’s performance goals, and monitoring data, based on business needs and current performance. The complete definition of workloads and performance goals is called a service definition. You may already have this kind of information in a service level agreement (SLA).

Determining CICS response times before defining goals

Before you set goals for CICS work, you can determine CICS current response times by running CICS in compatibility mode with an arbitrary goal. For this purpose, use the SRVCLASS parameter in the installation control specification (ICS). This parameter lets you associate a service class with a report performance group, to be run in compatibility mode. You would then:

  1. Define a service policy, with a default service class, or classes, for your CICS work, and specify an arbitrary response time goal (say 3 seconds)
  2. Define classification rules for the service class or classes (see Defining classification rules)
  3. Install the service definition
  4. Activate the service policy in compatibility mode.

The average response time for work within the service classes is reported under the report performance group in the RMF Monitor I workload activity report.

This information helps you to set realistic goals for running your CICS work when you switch to goal mode. The reporting data produced by RMF reports:

From the reported information, you may be able to determine configuration changes to improve performance.

Example of using SRVCLASS parameter of IEAICSxx

To obtain CICS response time information while in compatibility mode, you can set up the following:

You receive response time information about CICS transactions in the RMF Monitor I Workload Activity Report under report performance group 100. For more information about defining performance goals and the use of SRVCLASS, see the MVS Planning: Workload Management manual.

Related tasks
Setting up service definitions for MVS Workload Manager
Using MVS workload manager

Related concepts
MVS workload manager
Terms used in MVS workload management
Span of MVS workload manager operation
CICSPlex SM workload management
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