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CICS application outages cost your Company serious money! Shouldn’t you be doing everything possible to reduce and eliminate them? The CICS monitor in your site is inadequate and wont even show you the newer CICS resources. It’s time to look for solutions to the challenges of managing an evolving CICS infrastructure.

Click HERE to download PlexSpy today and begin a free trial !

Bring the strengths of the mainframe to your modern business applications by serving the Dojo Javascript Toolkit directly from CICS. Click HERE for more information.

Many of the worlds largest businesses and organisations depend upon IBM mainframe (system z) technology running CICS under z/OS to support their business critical systems. Owing to the scale of operations run by these organisations, system failures have devastatingly high costs. Consider the following study by Berkeley:

Service Outage Cost Estimates:
Credit Card Authorisations- $2,600,000 per hour
Brokerage Operations- $6,450,000 per hour
Package Shipping Services- $150,000 per hour
Reference: University of California, Berkeley

From our own experiences, we know that operational incidents with such huge implications occur almost monthly in large companies. We have also seen how long it can take to understand and rectify such problems. Take, for example, credit card authorisations in a modest bank: a single service outage of one hour is estimated to have immediate costs of $2,600,000. Assuming an incident may take one hour to understand and diagnose and another hour to rectify, the bank will have lost $5,200,000. This scenario only takes into account a fraction of the overall cost incurred by such a bank over the course of a year due to outages.

The mainframe platform itself is incredibly reliable and usually poses no problems. However, the software infrastructure, middleware, application code, system resources and data that support large companies can be so complex that issues often arise involving them.

When incidents arise, support staff need to understand the nature of the problem as quickly as possible to get the show back on the road. They need to have tools available that facilitate the investigation processes and these need to be up to the job.

CICS Application Monitoring across the Sysplex

The traditional CICS monitoring products alone are no longer up to that job. They do not draw attention to exactly what the support staff need to be looking at when calls for support come in. Unlike these traditional CICS monitors, PlexSpy does exactly that! By relating the specific CICS infrastructure resources associated with named CICS applications, support staff can determine the status of the CICS application much more quickly. Being able to do so will shorten recovery times leading to improved service quality, fewer outages and better change planning; saving your company money and its reputation.

PlexSpy – The Solution.

Using PlexSpy will save you huge amounts of time and money, make your support staff more responsive to business needs and boost credibility with your customers.

PlexSpy exploits the features and facilities of both CICS and CICSPlex SM. It is designed to help you get the most from your investment in CICS and will augment many other tools that you use to support your CICS based services.

PlexSpy is easy to install and use and will simplify your operation. PlexSpy will improve change planning and implementation monitoring, reducing the associated risks.

Learn what PlexSpy Application Status Monitor can do for your business.

If your business depends upon CICS on z/OS and has not yet implemented CICSPlex SM then you are missing out on many opportunities to improve service management. If it would help to speak to us about how to implement CICSPlex SM in your z/OS system, please look at the SERVICES page.

There is an excellent article in zJournal detailing the steps to take in order to make a start with CICSPlex SM. Read it here.

Did you know that CICSPlex SM can save and display CICS task history records? Read how to configure CICS and CICSPLex SM to achieve this by reading the article on zJournal here.

To watch a short podcast showing PlexSpy in action, click the image below – Sound and Vision.