Event monitoring points

CICS monitoring data is collected at system-defined event monitoring points (EMPs) in the CICS® code. Although you cannot relocate these monitoring points, you can choose which classes of monitoring data you want to be collected. Programming information about CICS monitoring is in the CICS Customization Guide.

If you want to gather more performance class data than is provided at the system-defined event monitoring points, you can code additional EMPs in your application programs. At these points, you can add or change up to 16384 bytes of user data in each performance record. Up to this maximum of 16384 bytes you can have, for each ENTRYNAME qualifier, any combination of the following:

You could use these additional EMPs to count the number of times a certain event occurs, or to time the interval between two events. If the performance class was active when a transaction was started, but was not active when a user EMP was issued, the operations defined in that user EMP would still execute on that transaction’s monitoring area. The DELIVER option would result in a loss of data at this point, because the generated performance record cannot be output while the performance class is not active. If the performance class was not active when a transaction was started, the user EMP would have no effect.

User EMPs can use the EXEC CICS MONITOR command. For programming information about this command, refer to the CICS Application Programming Reference.

Additional EMPs are provided in some IBM® program products, such as DBCTL. From CICS’s point of view, these are like any other user-defined EMP. EMPs in user applications and in IBM program products are identified by a decimal number. The numbers 1 through 199 are available for EMPs in user applications, and the numbers from 200 through 255 are for use in IBM program products. The numbers can be qualified with an ‘entryname’, so that you can use each number more than once. For example, PROGA.1, PROGB.1, and PROGC.1, identify three different EMPs because they have different entrynames.

For each user-defined EMP there must be a corresponding monitoring control table (MCT) entry, which has the same identification number and entryname as the EMP that it describes.

You do not have to assign entrynames and numbers to system-defined EMPs, and you do not have to code MCT entries for them.

Here are some ideas about how you might make use of the CICS and user fields provided with the CICS monitoring facility:

Application naming event monitoring points

You can also use application naming event monitoring points. Application naming is an enabling function that allows your application programs to invoke special CICS event monitoring points. Data collected at these CICS-generated EMPs can be used by any CICS monitoring reporting package.

For information about the APPLNAME parameter that you use to enable application naming support, see the CICS Resource Definition Guide.

Related tasks
Controlling CICS monitoring
Processing CICS monitoring facility output

Related concepts
The CICS monitoring facility
The classes of monitoring data: Overview
The monitoring control table (MCT)

Related reference
Interpreting CICS monitoring
Notes on the performance data
Performance class data
Exception class data
Transaction resource class data
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