A user-friendly monitoring and diagnostic tool can help you avoid bottlenecks and downtime in the central mainframe transaction and connectivity engine.
IT environments are increasingly complex to manage, and overburdened administrators are tasked with refining them, keeping them secure, and preventing downtime. Mainframes are critical to that infrastructure, as they process and store billions of transactions worth of sensitive data and confidential records daily. Any slowdown or disruption in mainframe performance can come with enormous financial and business continuity costs.
Large enterprises can lose up to $9,000 per minute during outages1. The stakes are even higher in industries with strict compliance demands, like finance and healthcare. In these industries, potential losses can easily exceed $5 million per hour on top of assessed fines and non-compliance penalties. Beyond financial penalties, organizations face long-term consequences, including hits to customer trust, brand reputation erosion, and possible regulatory scrutiny.
One of the critical components within an IBM IT environment is the Customer Information Control System (CICS). CICS is the transaction engine for countless real-time processes across industries. This middleware system manages online transactions and connectivity for various applications, requiring high reliability and performance.
Bottlenecks and downtime to these systems can be detrimental to an enterprise, leaving it unable to receive or process data until it is restored. These risks underscore the need for organizations to adopt tools designed to improve proactive performance monitoring and system optimization.
Navigating the complexities of a regulated landscape
Today, enterprises face mounting challenges, including increased regulatory demands, workforce skillset shifts, and ever-worsening system complexities. Recently implemented regulations, like the (DORA), mandate a higher standard of system resilience, levying additional costly penalties if downtime exceeds the allotted recovery time window.
This increased scrutiny emphasizes the need for preemptive measures to mitigate mainframe issues, including those with CICS. The trouble is that preventing these problems can be quite complex without the right expertise and solutions.
To make matters worse, IT teams face a growing talent vacuum caused by retiring seasoned mainframe professionals. Younger IT administrators may lack a deep understanding of mainframe technology, compounding the difficulty of troubleshooting issues in high-stakes environments. This knowledge gap becomes a significant operational challenge as applications become more interconnected and distributed.
CICS is crucial in sectors where speed, reliability, and security are non-negotiable, but CICS environments often suffer from performance challenges that can be difficult to detect and resolve, including:
- Latency in transaction response times
- CPU consumption spikes and inefficient workload distribution
- Fragmented diagnostics across complex environments
As CICS workloads scale, pinpointing performance inhibitors becomes increasingly complex, especially without experienced personnel.
CICS observability: A new era of new era of mainframe insight
Today鈥檚 enterprises need real-time diagnostics to optimize performance, anticipate problems, and react to issues as they occur. These insights can prevent CICS-related bottlenecks and improve resiliency during downtime.
CICS observability tools allow teams to detect, diagnose, and resolve issues in real time without requiring decades of mainframe experience. They transform raw operational data into actionable insights, giving teams the visibility they need to:
- Identify slow or failing transactions before they impact users
- Analyze performance metrics with intuitive visualizations
- Pinpoint inefficiencies in resource utilization
- Improve system-wide throughput without major code rewrites
These tools level the playing field for IT administrators who are not mainframe experts, making diagnostics accessible and fast.
Solutions like are designed to give enterprises full observability into their CICS environments through real-time monitoring and diagnostics with a user-friendly interface. This allows IT teams to act faster, giving them peace of mind and the resources they need to handle any issues that may crop up.
Modern enterprises need accessible, intelligent, and efficient IT environment tools. These solutions must address today鈥檚 mainframe challenges by simplifying these complex systems and enabling real-time, data-driven decisions. Implementing user-friendly tools reduces reliance on mainframe experts, improves performance, and reduces overall costs, helping organizations build more resilient and agile IT operations.
Learn how to through modern observability.
[1] April 10, 2024, Forbes Technology Council.
