z/TPF WebSphere MQ includes a trace facility enhancement to diagnose problems with applications and channels, including problems with new or existing applications that use a queue or channel problems. You can choose to display the trace on the console or to write the data to tape and process offline. Using tracing to tape instead of tracing to the console can avoid flooding the console with numerous messages. Using the trace facility adds overhead to the z/TPF system; therefore, you can enable trace only on a subset of queues or channels to reduce overhead.
Queue tracing collects function traces for all queues or a specific queue. Channel tracing collects function traces for all channels or a specific channel. Additionally, channel tracing allows the collection of a subset of communications data that is sent across a channel.
New trace tape options
With this enhancement, you can use the TRCTAPE parameter to specify a tape to collect trace data. The tape name must be a real-time tape and the default is to use the RTA tape.
You also can use the TRCTPQ parameter to check the tape queue length to prevent excessive consumption of system resources. After the tape queue limit is reached, tracing to tape is automatically stopped and must be manually restarted.
New trace collection options and data
With this enhancement, you can use the TRCLEN parameter to specify how much channel communications trace data is collected. The amount of message data that you can collect is in the range 28 – 4040 bytes. Trace now collects the system clock so that the offline trace utility can display microseconds. Communications trace was enhanced to collect the local and remote port and the local and remote IP addresses.
New trace utility options on Linux on z Systems
The mqtrace utility on Linux on z was enhanced to display microseconds on all time-stamps in both function and communication trace. New options for filtering were added to filter trace data by channel name, time, port, IP address, and socket.
A tutorial video for this enhancement is available on the z/TPF YouTube channel.
IBM TPF YouTube Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXpmMvLF-3c
The configuration files and consoles used in the demo are available at: https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/blogs/zTPF/resource/PJ44252_config_logs.zip?lang=en
For more information about APAR PJ44252, see the APEDIT.