Using IPCS to format and analyze CICS dumps: Overview

The interactive problem control system (IPCS) provides MVS™ installations with an interactive facility for diagnosing software failures.

About this task

MVS SDUMPs can be produced by CICS® or by entering the MVS DUMP command. You can use IPCS to format and analyze these SDUMPs or to analyze stand-alone dumps obtained when CICS was active in the system being dumped. You can view the dumps at your terminal or you can print them.

The IPCS dump analysis subcommands enable you to:
  • Examine the data in a dump
  • Locate and verify control blocks associated with certain functions or system components
  • Trace and verify chains of control blocks
  • Perform contention analysis on key MVS resources
  • Locate modules and unit control blocks (UCBs)
  • Execute user-written exits for certain control blocks
  • Keep a list of the names and locations of control blocks and areas of dump that you consider important.
To enable you to analyze CICS SDUMPs written to dump data sets by the SDUMP macro, you can use the IPCS VERBEXIT subcommand to execute a CICS-supplied IPCS dump exit. This dump exit enables you to:
  • Process a dump selectively by specifying one or more CICS component identifiers as parameters to the exit.
  • Select parts of the CICS internal trace table to format for a system dump. How you do this is described in Selecting parts of the CICS internal trace table.

For further information about IPCS, see the z/OS MVS IPCS User's Guide.