The HostBridge team recently went onsite to help a customer solve an IT Operations analytics problem. The need was to understand how to correlate non-mainframe requests coming from end-users who use server-based applications to work done inside CICS to process those requests. This situation is becoming far more common as CICS serves as a component of hybrid IT applications. This customer was looking for a way to trace unexplained CICS workload spikes to their point-of-origin off of the host.

Workload spikes on the host aren’t necessarily a problem when their cause is known. When that is the case, they are manageable, allowing IT to plan for and around them. However, unexplained spikes are problematic for several reasons:

• They drive up processing costs.
• They can have the same effect as a Denial of Service attack, consuming lots of cycles that prevent other work from processing.
• They create a performance bottleneck.

This particular customer with whom we were working had no data about the end-to-end performance of their hybrid IT applications. They were completely in the dark about how to manage and improve performance of those applications. This was due to their inability to include CICS performance data on their Splunk dashboards.

The HostBridge team installed the HostBridge Transaction Analytics Connector (HTAC), software correlates non-mainframe service requests to processing done inside CICS to service those requests. Watch this 5-minute video to hear HostBridge CEO Russ Teubner discuss the work the team did, and to see the dashboards created in Splunk that include CICS performance data:

Try HTAC

Enterprises with CICS can test HTAC at no cost. HTAC currently supports Splunk and Elastic. To request a copy of HTAC, or to learn more about starting a free, supported HTAC pilot, contact us using the form below.

Complete this form to start a dialogue with HostBridge about analyzing your CICS resource consumption: