How to Overcome CICS Issues Without Being a Mainframe Expert

Increase efficiency and save costs with CICS insights

Enterprises rely on the mainframe for processing transactions and storing critical data, making downtime or performance slowdowns extremely costly. Mainframes handle billions of transactions per day, and even minor inefficiencies can lead to significant financial and operational consequences. To stay competitive, organizations must proactively identify performance bottlenecks and optimize system efficiency. 

According to a recent Forbes article, downtime can cost as much as $9,000 per minute for large organizations, with highly regulated industries, like finance and healthcare, potentially losing over $6 million per hour. Beyond financial impact, outages can also lead to customer churn, damaged brand reputation, and regulatory fines and penalties.

Increasing efficiency and saving costs with the right CICS insights is essential for minimizing these risks, as one auto club organization found when they leveraged Rocket C\Prof to improve transactional performance:

Source: “Maximizing CICS Performance with Observability Insights” white paper by Intellyx for Rocket Software

The growing complexity of mainframe performance management

Modern enterprises face new challenges in maintaining mainframe performance. Heightened regulatory standards, like the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), require enterprises to minimize downtime, be more resilient, and restore operations rapidly. However, a persistent mainframe talent shortage complicates efforts to meet these demands. As experienced mainframe professionals retire, younger IT talent often lacks the specialized expertise required to diagnose and resolve mainframe and Customer Information Control System (CICS) issues.

Given CICS’s role as the middleware system that manages high-volume financial and transactional processes, IT teams must be equipped with tools that enable rapid troubleshooting and provide actionable insights to increase efficiency and reduce costs.

Key challenges in managing CICS performance

CICS plays a vital role in industries such as banking, telecommunications, and healthcare, facilitating high-speed transaction processing. However, mainframe teams often struggle with:

• Performance bottlenecks and slow response times
• High CPU consumption and inefficient resource allocation
• Complex transaction diagnostics across multiple CICS regions
• Limited mainframe expertise among IT teams

Traditionally, resolving these issues requires experienced mainframe professionals. However, the growing complexity of enterprise applications means IT teams must now adopt modern observability tools that offer clear diagnostics without extensive mainframe training. The right insights into CICS performance can dramatically improve efficiency and reduce operational costs.

Enhancing CICS observability for faster issue resolution

CICS observability empowers IT teams with deeper visibility into transactional performance, enabling them to identify and resolve issues before they impact customers. 

Solutions like Rocket C\Prof simplify CICS problem analysis by providing intuitive transaction analytics, allowing IT professionals—regardless of expertise level—to quickly pinpoint performance problems and drive efficiency improvements.

Rocket^® C\Prof enables enterprises to:

• Reduce risk and improve performance by offering real-time visibility into CICS transactions without requiring invasive code changes.
• Accelerate troubleshooting with clear data visualizations and trace analysis that highlight problematic transactions.
• Optimize costs by identifying inefficient workloads, reducing CPU consumption, and preventing unnecessary capacity-on-demand expenses.

One organization leveraged C\Prof to eliminate 1 billion non-essential transactions per week, reducing z/16^® processor usage by 25% and improving transaction speeds by 50%. Similarly, a regional auto club reduced CPU time by 90% and saved up to $300K per month by using C\Prof to eliminate inefficient transaction abends that previously drove up CPU consumption.

Equip IT teams with the right tools for mainframe resilience

To ensure business continuity, IT teams need simple-to-use observability tools that offer real-time insights into CICS performance, enabling quick issue resolution without deep mainframe expertise.

CICS monitoring solutions like Rocket^® C\Prof help enterprises:

• Improve incident response times by providing immediate visibility into transaction failures.
• Enhance operational efficiency by reducing manual investigation efforts.
• Increase cost savings by proactively tuning system performance and optimizing CPU utilization.

By adopting modern CICS observability solutions, enterprises can enhance performance, reduce downtime risks, and future-proof their mainframe operations, ensuring they remain competitive in an increasingly digital world. 

Read our latest whitepaper and learn more about how Rocket^® C\Prof can help power your modernization journey.