I have been doing a deep dive into this product, in my ten years I have never been an actual user of this product as the in house performance team was the sole user of it. From the outside this product looks ancient, who still looks at batch reports in this day and age of Grafana. So as I began to unravel the mystery of SMF reporting, end of day shutdown statistics, 110 records and the such I realized that the newest product version 5.4 and even older versions such as 5.2 have much newer capabilities.

Step one was to set up an HDB for report retention, this was great as I no longer had to worry about SMF records, everything was going to be available in the HDB. Its also pretty easy to use, underneath the fancy name its just a VSAM file. This acts as your one stop repository, you can even set rules for retention. The next step is to move the HDB into DB2 tables. As far as I can tell this is only done for quicker data access and the ability to read the data remotely through the Explorer plug in. The catch here is that users now need access to DB2 tables, tools, and system predefined stored procedures. Our DB2 group just made us admins of the tools and our tables. This access issue I ran into was not documented anywhere.

The final state I want to get to is to test out the following Beta:

https://developer.ibm.com/cics/2019/03/08/cics-statistics-visualizer/