Support for APM tokens in CICS Transaction Gateway

The use of Application Performance Management software continues to grow rapidly in large enterprises. The market has a 25.1% CAGR, and is expected to grow in value to almost $6 billion by 2023 (“MarketsandMarkets Cognitive Operations Market Global Forecast to 2023”). The majority of large enterprise clients have the IBM Z Systems as the system of record for their key business applications. These IBM Z clients expect to have their Z workloads visible in the APM solutions they have deployed on the open systems parts of their applications. In order to build a complete picture of a transaction in CICS environment there must be a mechanism which will allow the user to understand the relationship between the CICS transactions and the front end calling these CICS transactions.

Most APM solutions use some form of correlation token to create the relationships between different middleware stacks that are working together to fulfill a business application request. For standard open protocols there is often a mechanism available to pass these correlation tokens with the application request.

For the use case of CICS transactions that are being called through CICS Transaction Gateway, there is currently not a way in which these correlation tokens can be propagated from the calling application through CTG, and finally onto the CICS region executing the transaction.