Detecting and avoiding duplicate system dumps

When more than one CICS® system runs under one instance of the z/OS operating system, two CICS systems can take duplicate system dumps.

Each CICS system dump header includes a symptom string. The symptom string will be created only if the system dump code has the DAE option specified in the dump table entry. The default action is that symptom strings are not produced. This can, however, be altered by means of the DAE system initialization parameter.

The symptom strings provide sufficient information to enable the detection of duplicate dumps. You can take advantage of this in either of two ways:
  1. Use z/OS Dump Analysis Elimination (DAE) to detect and suppress duplicate dumps. (If the symptom string has been suppressed by the dump table option, DAE will not suppress the system dump.)

    You can control DAE with an ADYSETxx parmlib member. For information about DAE, see z/OS MVS Diagnosis: Tools and Service Aids.

  2. Manually compare the headers of system dumps, so that you are aware that you have duplicate dumps. Doing it this way, you avoid repeating the same analysis, but still have a separate dump listing for each CICS system.