Cloud Enabling IBM CICS

Book excerpt: This IBM® Redbooks® publication takes an existing IBM 3270-COBOL-VSAM application and describes how to use the features of IBM Customer Information Control System (CICS®) Transaction Server (CICS TS) cloud enablement. Working with the General Insurance Application (GENAPP) as an example, this book describes the steps needed to monitor both platform and application health using the CICS Explorer CICS Cloud perspective. It also shows you how to apply threshold policy and measure resource usage, all without source code changes to the original application. In addition, this book describes how to use multi-versioning to safely and reliably apply and back out application changes. This Redbooks publication includes instructions about the following topics: How to create a CICS TS platform to manage and reflect the health of a set of CICS TS regions, and the services that they provide to applications How to quickly get value from CICS TS applications, by creating and deploying a CICS TS application for an existing user application How to protect your CICS TS platform from erroneous applications by using threshold policies How to deploy and run multiple versions of the same CICS TS application on the same CICS TS platform at the same time, enabling a safer migration from one application version to another, with no downtime How to measure application resource usage, enabling a comparison of the performance of different application versions, and chargeback based on application use This book describes how CICS TS cloud enablement uses existing operational facilities, including monitoring, events, transaction tracking, CICS TS bundles, and IBM CICSPlex® System Manager (CICSPlex SM), to integrate with existing deployment and management processes.