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  • Fine tune your performance

    EXPERT CICS PERFORMANCE™

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  • CICS PERFORMANCE TUNING

    FOR MVS AND VSE

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  • Not Another Performance Monitor

    it serves as a valuable compliment to more traditional CICS monitors

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What is C\TREK™?

THE C\TREK™ EXPERT CICS PERFORMANCE TUNER™ IS A TOOL USED BY MAINFRAME SYSTEM PROGRAMMERS TO OPTIMIZE CICS SYSTEM PERFORMANCE IN A FRACTION OF THE TIME REQUIRED WHEN USING MORE TRADITIONAL CICS MONITORS. BY AUTOMATING THE ANALYSIS OF VAST AMOUNTS OF CICS DATA, ISOLATING PERFORMANCE PROBLEMS AND MAKING EXPERT RECOMMENDATIONS FOR CORRECTIVE ACTION, IT ENABLES IBM DATA CENTERS TO SAVE VALUABLE STAFF TIME, DELAY SYSTEM UPGRADES, AND TRANSITION TO A MORE PROACTIVE APPROACH TO CICS SYSTEM PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT.

• Recover wasted system resources (CPU cycles, disk space, virtual and real storage)

• Avoid or delay expensive mainframe system capacity upgrades

• Optimize mainframe resources with less experienced system programmers

• Improve business application response time

• Reduce critical business application downtime

• Orient and train new staff on the entire CICS operating environment

• Provide application programmers with a useful tool for optimizing system software performance

• Transition from a reactive break/fix mode to a more proactive performance management discipline




C\TREK™ HELPS YOU

  • “There’s nothing else quite like it. We’re setting up a process to continuously monitor and improve our operational systems and C\TREK will be at the center of it.”

    Systems Programmer, national insurance provider

  • “No one offers the same solution as C\TREK.”

    Operating Systems Engineer, multinational bank

  • “There’s nothing it can’t do in terms of looking at CICS resources.”

    Senior Systems Programmer, global marketer of consumer and commercial products

  • “C\TREK takes away the guesswork of tuning CICS. It gives a summarized view with lots of detailed information.”

    Assistant Vice President, technology solutions provider to large financial institutions

  • “We’ve come to rely heavily on C\TREK’s file tuning recommendations and Abend information.”

    Systems Programmer, multinational bank

  • “This is the best tool I’ve ever seen. The value of the information is what makes C\TREK different from other similar tools. It captures everything.”

    Project Leader, national insurance provider

  • “C\TREK lets you see everything that is wrong with your system and provides recommendations about what to do about it. It dramatically cuts down your research time to be proactive and fix problems.”

    Systems Programmer, national insurance provider

CAPABILITIES & ADVANTAGES

  • Automates analysis of large amounts of CICS operating data to identify performance problems
  • Summarizes and highlights problem areas and provides specific tuning recommendations
  • Provides complete coverage of the entire CICS environment
  • Covers analysis and tuning of SIT parameters, VSAM files, LSR pools, CICS and z/OS control blocks, Temporary Storage, DB2 and Abend handling
  • Provides information about external areas that affect CICS performance such as CPU utilization, paging, Task I/O Table, Auxiliary Storage Manager, and address space priorities and VTAM information
  • Breaks CPU utilization down by CICS, DB2, TCP/IP, WebSphere, MQSeries, and operating system
  • Provides direct access to CICS areas and control blocks to facilitate problem analysis
  • Unmatched technical support from CICS performance tuning experts
Quickly Identify and Correct CICS Performance Issues

C\TREK™ Expert CICS Performance Tuner™ provides complete coverage of the CICS environment as well as important external enterprise systems.

Parameter Definition Tuning
C\TREK™ reviews all the parameters that have been specified for the system and resources such as transaction and program definitions. For example, the use of the “storage clear” command in the transaction definition that adds additional CPU overhead is identified by C\TREK™. In addition, C\TREK™ analyzes the System Initialization Table parameters and identifies those parameters that should be reviewed to improve performance. It also reviews the LE options parameters (CEECOPT) and Java definitions and identifies those that require attention.
Buffer Tuning
C\TREK™ improves transaction response times by fine tuning look-aside hit ratios in both NSR and LSR files. It reviews the string allocation by pool and makes recommendations as to how many should be allocated. It checks for NSR files that don’t have the proper BUFNI allocations. It also includes a series of transactions that help identify poor resource utilization such as buffer fragmentation, buffer monopolization by a particular file, or incorrect pool initialization. C\TREK™ is the only tool that identifies how many buffers within an LSR pool are allocated to each file. This makes it easy to identify when a particular file is monopolizing a particular buffer in a pool.
VSAM File Tuning
C\TREK™ makes the tuning of VSAM files easy by identifying problem areas that would require a significant amount of system programmer time using other methods, such as traditional monitors. In addition to assisting in the buffer tuning for NSR and LSR files, C\TREK™ provides recommendations on tuning the Cluster Definition parameters to ensure that the proper parameters are used, that sufficient/correct free space is allocated, that the data and index CISZ are optimum, that the correct CA size has been defined, that the file is not over/under allocated, and identifies files that should be reorganized. Recommendations for the file cluster definition are provided.
DB2 Tuning
C\TREK™ provides recommendations and information on how the CICS-DB2 connection may be improved by providing statistics that help determine the number of threads allocated (protected and unprotected), reconciliation of threads assigned to the pool, DB2 Entries and Command versus the connection thread limit, and SIT MAXOPENTCBS parameter and the reuse of threads.
Abend Handling
The C\TREK™ abend handler captures information regarding typical ASRA (program check abends) but more importantly, it captures information about storage violations and short on storage (SOS) conditions. With the initial information captured regarding the storage violation, the user can quickly determine the active transactions, the damaged area, and the program and task involved. In some cases, this avoids having to analyze a system dump. In the case of SOS conditions, the abend handler can identify the tasks involved, the amount of storage allocated and used by task, and the amount of storage requested that caused the SOS condition. Other Tuning Areas. There are other areas within CICS that can affect resource use by CICS TS such as storage below the line. C\TREK™ has a function to review up to 180 different potential problems that could affect performance of the CICS system.
Other Tuning Areas
There are other areas within CICS that can affect resource use by CICS TS such as storage below the line. C\TREK™ has a function to review up to 180 different potential problems that could affect performance of the CICS system.

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What Customers Have To Say

9.6 out of 10

of customers surveyed said they would be “Extremely Likely” to recommend C\TREK to a friend or colleague.

9.7 out of 10

of customers surveyed said they would be “Extremely Likely” to renew their C\TREK software license.

9.3 out of 10

of customers surveyed said C\TREK is “Extremely Effective” in meeting their CICS performance management requirements.