Monitoring and Diagnosing IP Applications › How You Use Business Application Names

How You Use Business Application Names

The primary goal of a mainframe-based network is to provide reliable access to critical data and applications that reside on z/OS systems. This data and these applications underpin many of your business applications and services. Being able to view network activity and workload in terms of your key business applications and services enables you to better understand their well-being, prioritize network events, and assure service to the business.

You can define application names to group connections to specific business applications. During Express Setup, you can request that business applications be defined for the discovered address spaces. You can also define applications manually from the Application Definition Name List. The shortcut is /IPAPPLS. You can set connection alerts for defined applications through Connection Workload Monitoring in STACK resources.

You can define application names to group connections to specific business applications. During Express Setup, you can specify whether you want to define applications names automatically for discovered address spaces. You can also set connection alerts by application through Connection Workload Monitoring in STACK resources.

After monitoring has been active for some time, you can view the traffic for these applications by various means, for example:

• From the IP Traffic Summary
• Using the TRS (Display IP Traffic Statistics) or WC (Display Connection Workload Performance) line command on a STACK resource
  • The TRS command displays application traffic by bytes and packets.
  • The WC command enables you to display the data collected for monitored attributes such as ConActive, which gives the total number of connections by applications.

The following process shows you how to implement business application monitoring:

1. Enter /IPAPPLS, and refine or add application name definitions.
2. Wait for data to be collected for the applications.
3. Set connection alerts. Enter /IPMON and then UM next to a STACK resource on the current system. Set alerts for the Connection Workload Monitoring attributes as required. You can qualify the attributes by the different applications that have data and set different alerts for the qualified attributes. The relevant attributes are ConActive, ConBytes, and ConConnects.

Examples: Application Names

The following examples show some possible application names:

• FOREX as an application name for all connections between local port 12345 and remote addresses x through y
• HTTPS as an application name for all connections to local ports 443 and 8443
• WebSphereMQ as an application name for all connections to local port 1414