CSMF - CICS System Management Facility

Enhanced Definition

CSMF (CICS System Management Facility) is a CICS component that provides a standardized, programmatic interface for external system management products to monitor, control, and automate tasks within CICS regions. It acts as a bridge, allowing these tools to interact with CICS resources and events, thereby enhancing operational efficiency and problem resolution.

Key Characteristics

- Standardized Interface: Offers a consistent API for external management tools to interact with CICS, abstracting the complexities of direct CICS internal interfaces.
- Event-Driven Capabilities: Can be configured to notify external systems about specific CICS events, such as transaction abends, resource shortages, or threshold breaches.
- Automation Facilitation: Enables external automation products to initiate CICS commands, modify resource definitions, or perform other administrative actions programmatically.
- Problem Determination Support: Provides diagnostic information and allows external tools to query CICS status and resource usage, aiding in the identification and resolution of issues.
- Integration with External Products: Designed to work seamlessly with IBM system management solutions like OMEGAMON for CICS, NetView, and various third-party automation and monitoring tools.
- Resource Management: Allows external products to manage CICS resources such as transactions, programs, files, and connections, including their status and attributes.

Use Cases

- Automated CICS Region Monitoring: An external monitoring tool uses CSMF to continuously collect performance metrics (e.g., CPU usage, transaction response times, storage utilization) from CICS regions.
- Dynamic Resource Adjustment: Based on real-time data obtained via CSMF, an automation script might dynamically increase the MAXTASKS value for a CICS region during peak load periods.
- Problem Alerting and Remediation: When a CICS short-on-storage (SOS) condition is detected via CSMF, an external system can trigger an alert to operations staff and potentially initiate an automated storage cleanup or region restart.
- Scheduled CICS Operations: An enterprise scheduler leverages CSMF to gracefully shut down CICS regions for maintenance windows or to start them up at the beginning of a business day.
- Security Policy Enforcement: An external security product uses CSMF to audit CICS transaction usage or to enforce specific security policies by querying or modifying CICS resource security definitions.

Related Concepts

CSMF is a critical component for integrating CICS into the broader z/OS system management and automation landscape. It complements CICS's internal monitoring facilities by externalizing the collected data and enabling actionable responses from external systems. It often works in conjunction with CICS System Programming Interfaces (SPIs), providing a more structured and robust interface for external products than direct SPI calls. CSMF is a key enabler for z/OS automation products like SA for z/OS and NetView, allowing them to manage CICS regions as part of an enterprise-wide automation strategy.

Best Practices:

Selective Configuration: Only enable and configure the specific CSMF functions and event notifications that are actively utilized by your external management products to minimize CICS overhead.
Secure Access: Implement robust security controls using RACF or equivalent z/OS security managers to ensure that only authorized external systems and users can interact with CICS via CSMF.
Monitor CSMF Performance: Regularly monitor the resource consumption and performance impact of CSMF itself to ensure it is not introducing bottlenecks or excessive overhead within the CICS region.
Thorough Testing of Automation: Rigorously test all automation routines and external product integrations that utilize CSMF in a non-production environment before deploying them to production.
Stay Current with CICS Releases: Keep your CICS regions updated to the latest maintenance levels to benefit from enhancements, performance improvements, and bug fixes related to CSMF.