Dashboards for CICS

HostBridge has access to CICS data that allows organizations to monitor performance of systems or collect business information to measure performance of an organization.

Large organizations maintain decades of business data under CICS on the mainframe. Within this data lay the key performance indicators (KPI) that reflect past performance, assess present state of business, and can prescribe a course of action. Dashboards allow you to monitor KPIs and present a view of the data that illustrates the value of the activities being measured. Dashboard views can provide snapshots of current data or retrieve information from repositories to establish trends based on historical data. These dashboards often appear as stand-alone applications or as part of Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) suites

The CICS Dashboard Framework (CDF) extracts information from CICS applications and data sources, processes the data, and sends it to dashboards for presentation to the user. Many organizations run nightly batch processes to generate reports or to populate a repository, which means users are not basing business decisions on the most current data available. The CDF provides valuable real-time access to CICS data so users can see actual business conditions and make more informed decisions.

Architecture

The CDF architecture passes data between CICS and middle tier applications such as dashboards, widgets, or other programs that can generate views from collected data.
Adobe Systems
Figure 1. CICS-based process automation reduces latency; simplifies architectures

Components

The CDF includes three components: collectors, connectors, and the KPI engine.

  • Collectors gather data from CICS. The CDF includes ready collectors for standard CICS performance data such as CPU consumption, maximum tasks, and memory use which can be of use to CICS system administrators. It also includes the ability to create custom collectors for pulling data from CICS application and data sources.
  • The KPI engine receives a request for real-time data, invokes the collectors, and converts the results to XML. By converting data to XML, the information can be displayed within XML-ready dashboards and widgets (for example, Yahoo! Widgets) or converted to other formats by CDF connectors.
  • Connectors receive the CDF data and reformat it for use by dashboards that cannot use the XML output from the processing engine. In many cases, dashboards use either proprietary data formats or specific XML structures; the connectors ensure data integrity during transformations from one format to another.  The CDF includes ready connectors for common middle tier applications such as iDashboards, Yahoo! Widgets, and Lotus Notes.

Combine Data from Multiple Sources

Valuable data rarely resides in a single application or data source, and metrics that define key performance indicators often combine data from multiple sources into a single view. The CDF allows developers to execute multiple CICS transactions, query multiple data sources, and process the returned data into a single response to be sent to the dashboard and presented to the user.

Conclusion

Dashboards put people in touch with real-time business information so organizations can make high-quality decisions, but they are only as useful as the information they collect. The CICS Dashboard Framework exposes the data hidden within legacy systems and provides it to dashboards to increase the value of the views they present. The KPI engine and collectors run within CICS to ensure greater fidelity of the captured information, while the connectors ensure the fidelity of the data as it is reformatted and passed off to the dashboards for display to the users. The combination of the CDF to capture corporate data and the ability of dashboards to display data as useful information ensures that organizations have access to the best business intelligence for making quality strategic decisions.