To control the operation of multiple instances of the Collector, running on different CICS® regions, from a single CICS terminal, you must share the dependency data files, the affinity data files, and the control record file across all the regions being monitored.
The alternative is to define local dependency and affinity data files, and a control record file, on each region to be monitored. In this way, from a CICS terminal you can control only an instance of the Collector running on the local region.
KSDS files are used because the Collector and the Dependency and Affinity Reporters need keyed access to the data. The files are not recoverable because of the large amount of data that might need to be written.
The dependency data files and affinity data files contain a header record for each CICS region that has been or is being monitored by the Collector. The header record enables both the Collector and the Reporter to validate that the files that are presented are data files suitable for CICS IA. The header record has a key in the same format as the rest of the keys on the file, so a table identifier of zero is used. No real table will have a table identifier of zero. The header record contains the CICS specific APPLID, thus allowing files to be cross validated.