GSE UK Virtual Conference 2021 – my impressions, part 2

Last time, I looked at the first week of the Guide Share Europe Conference. This time, I want to share my experiences of the second week of virtual presentations.

I started the second week on the Tuesday with “Developing and modernizing CICS applications with Ansible”, presented by IBM’s Stewart Francis. The presentation looked at Ansible for z/OS and especially how that relates to CICS Transaction Server. Stewart first examined what Ansible is and what support it has on z/OS. He then introduced the audience to the CICS collection for Ansible. He said that Ansible is a provisioning, configuration management and application deployment tool, with the tagline: “Turn tough tasks into repeatable playbooks”. He went on to say that rather than managing one system at a time, Ansible models your IT infrastructure by describing how all your systems inter-relate. He said that Ansible is extremely popular across many enterprises. For example, it’s now the top cloud configuration tool and is heavily used on-prem too. Some of the reasons for that include:

• It normalizes tooling across a multitude of platforms
• It centralizes your enterprise automation strategy
• You can achieve configuration as code
• There are over 3000 modules for all the things you might need it to do.

The next session I saw was “CICS Resource Configuration for Target Environments” by IBM’s Chris Hodgins. He started his presentation with some questions: 

• Is testing as close to production as possible? 
• Can you avoid application changes for different environments?
• Fluid environments like development with unique deployments per developer? 
• Can you control and manage those differences so you can easily see what will change? 
• Can you identify those changes easily during problem determination?

He then spent the rest of the presentation explaining in detail how to use CICS resource overrides, including how they can be specified, installed, and monitored. Chris described it as a different approach to CICS configuration. And how it can be combined with the CICS resource builder to streamline development resource creation.

I then did a lunch and learn session. It was “Five Tips To Energize Your Next Presentation” given by Glenn Anderson. It was a hugely enjoyable presentation, and, as I was giving a presentation at GSE on Thursday, I thought it may have some useful tips. Glenn said that if you’re giving a presentation and you want people to stay awake, you need enthusiasm, interaction, and clarity – although he admitted that interaction on Zoom was hard. He said to make the first 15 seconds count because that’s when the audience gets an impression of you. Don’t put too many words on a PowerPoint slide. And end with a call to action.

Next, it was “CICS performance, monitoring, and statistics: Making sense of all the numbers” from IBM’s Dan Zachary. He said that CICS monitoring and statistics provide a wealth of information. His presentation focused on Dispatcher statistics/monitoring terms like 'wait for re-dispatch', 'QR CPU / dispatch ratio', 'wait for 1st dispatch', and 'QR TCB saturation'. He looked at what these terms meant and how to use them to solve and prevent the most common CICS performance problems.

Then I watched Rocket Software’s Ezriel Gross, again. This time his presentation was “CICS Performance and Tuning 101”. He gave us an introduction to tuning and reasons to tune, and looked at application versus systems. He then looked at tuning methodology, followed by the anatomy of response time – which I always enjoy seeing. He moved on to data collection and reporting facilities. Having completed the theory side of things, he looked at getting started: monitoring, DFH0STAT, and end-of-day (EOD) statistics. He finished by giving us some examples of resources to tune.

I started Wednesday with “Producing and consuming messages in Kafka from CICS applications”, which was presented by Mark Cocker, IBM, CICS Transaction Server Product Manager. Mark reminded us that Apache Kafka is a distributed event streaming platform typically used for high-performance data pipelines, streaming analytics, data integration, and interconnecting mission-critical applications. His session introduced options for CICS applications to produce and consume messages in Kafka, including example code of the Kafka API in CICS. Mark divided his talk into the following sections: messaging and events; what Kafka is; CICS application options and considerations to interact with Kafka; CICS use cases with Kafka; and some code examples.

Back with IMS stream, I saw IBM’s Robert Recknagel‘s presentation entitled “IMS and the Relational Database”. Data Definition Language (DDL) was introduced with IBM Version 14 as a modern industry-standard way to define databases and programs in IMS. This session looked at the DDL infrastructure of IMS, the DDL syntax of IMS, ways to execute DDL in IMS, the challenges with mixed ACBGEN/DDL environments, migrating to a DDL-only environment, and unresolved issues with DDL.

I started Thursday with an “Overview and best practices of tuning IMS data entry databases” from Anshul Agrawal and Aditya Srivastava, who both work for BMC Software. They gave an overview of DEDB analysis and tuning, saying that DEDB tuning typically involves setting the database and area attributes to minimize the physical I/O requirements. They also looked at the four parts of a DEDB area: the root addressable area part (RAA); the dependent overflow part (DOVF); the independent overflow part (IOVF); and the sequential dependent part (SDEP).

At 10:30, I gave a presentation to the enterprise security working group entitled “Defending your mainframe against hackers, ransomware, and internal threats”. It covered: a beginner’s guide to mainframe hacking techniques; the issue with insider threats; the anatomy of a typical mainframe ransomware attack; your best defence and recovery strategies; and hidden benefits – better security equals better compliance (GDPR, PCI, NIST). It had about 36 attendees and I received some very positive comments afterwards.

The last session I attended of the day, and of the conference, was “Good, Better, Best – Are You Buffering IMS Efficiently?”, which was presented by IBM’s Suzie Wendler, Dennis Eichelberger, and Rick Engel. Suzy has presented to the Virtual IMS user group a number of times. Buffers can be monitored using IMS Monitor, IMS Performance Analyzer, or IMS Buffer Pool Analyzer. Buffer pool tuning is an integral part of improving overall IMS system performance.

I mainly focused on the CICS and IMS streams. There were plenty of other streams, all with excellent content. Hopefully, next year, the conference will be live rather than virtual. But, however it happens, it’s always excellent and a great way to learn about Z.