Allow Filtering on CICS system Policies

Support for this is also provided in CICS TS 6.1 which is generally available from 17th June 2022.

For more information see https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/cics-ts/6.1?topic=whats-new

This requirement is also satisfied by CICS TS 6.1 which is announced today April 5th and will GA June 17th 2022.

See Announcement letter https://www.ibm.com/common/ssi/ShowDoc.wss?docURL=/common/ssi/rep_ca/2/897/ENUS222-092/index.html&request_locale=en
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This RFE is satisfied by APAR PH26145 which is available on CICS TS 5.4, 5.5 and 5.6. The policy editor support is provided bi CICS Explorer 5.5.0.11 which can be used with all these CICS TS releases.

The policy task rules editor now allows you to specify a filter of transid and userid for all existing task rules. You can set conditions of equals, does not equal, starts with, or does not start with. This allows for support of specific transaction ids or user ids, also wildcarding, plus the ability to include or exclude transactions or sets of transactions from the policy.

This is something we would like to address. The RFE is being moved into 'Planned for Future release' status. Please note:
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We are re-opening this RFE to address the issue highlighted by the following comment after it was closed

"We have a system wide policy that no transaction can consume more than 1 second of CPU. This covers 100's of transactions.
But there is always an exception where one transaction needs to be allowed slightly more than 1 second of CPU. Without defining
100's of policies - one for every transaction we have, there is no way to allow just one transaction to run above the system wide policy
of maximum of 1 second of CPU."

Currently there is no way to EXLCUDE specific transactions from a region wide policy as suggested by this comment

We have a system wide policy that no transaction can consume more than 1 second of CPU. This covers 100's of transactions. But there is always an exception where one transaction needs to be allowed slightly more than 1 second of CPU. Without defining 100's of policies - one for every transaction we have, there is no way to allow just one transaction to run above the system wide policy of maxiumun of 1 second of CPU.

In CICS TS 5.1 and 5.2 there is already support which may be sufficient to satisfy this requirement. It is possible to limit a policy to a specific transaction by defining a PROGRAM Entry Point and a Policyscope. The following CICSDev blog entry shows you how to do this: https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/blogs/cicsdev/entry/restricting_the_scope_cics_policies_deployed_to_a_cics_region?lang=en.

This method works well if the PROGRAM is only invoked by the TRANSACTION you are looking to apply policy to. However if you have multiple transactions that invoke the same program and you only want to apply policy to some of them this method of restricting policy does not work so well and policy may get applied to task you do not want it applied to.

This restriction is removed in CICS TS 5.3 which introduced support for TRANSACTION entry points. So now you can define a TRANSACTION Entry Point and a Policyscope for each of the transaction you want to apply you policy to and your policy is only applied those specific transactions.

Lets say you want to limit a CPU policy to TRANSACTION ABCD. In your CICS bundle your will:

1) Define a CPU Policy. Lets call it "Tran_ABCD_CPU_policy"
2) Then you will use the CICS Bundle manifest editor to edit the manifest file cics.xml and select the "Entry Points" tab to define a TRANSACTION entry point for TRANSACTION ABCD as follows:
i) Specify an operation name of you choice up to 64 chars in length, e.g, "TRNA_entry_point"
ii) Select a resource type of TRANSACTION from drop down list
iii) Specify a resource name of the transaction you want to limit the policy to, i.e. "ABCD"

3) Then select the "Policy Scopes " tab in the CICS bundle manifest editor and define a corresponding policy scope to limit the scope of the policy "Tran_ABCD_CPU_policy" to TRANSACTION ABCD. You do this by specifying
i) The operation name defined at step 2i above, i.e. "TRNA_entry_point"
ii) The name of the policy defined at step 1, i.e. "Tran_ABCD_CPU_policy"

Repeat steps 2 and 3 for each TRANSACION you want to apply the policy "Tran_ABCD_CPU_policy" to.

4) Install the bundle into CICS and the policy "Tran_ABCD_CPU_policy" will only ever be applied to TRANSACTION ABCD; all other transactions will be unaffected.