Viewing CICS Task Application Trace information

Once you have created an application trace filter, the CICS Task Application Trace panel, KCPTASTR, will show application trace information reflecting the filter(s) currently active.

  1. Select the CICSplex.
  2. From the CICSplex Regions Summary, enter letter O next to the CICS region you want to work with.
  3. From the CICS Task History Summary. Select a task from the Transaction ID column to bring up Task History Detail.
  4. Then, double-click on Trace active, in the Details tab, to bring up CICS Task Application Trace panel. This panel displays trace data for the task you have selected.

Creating filters from the CICS Task Application Trace panel

From the CICS Task Application Trace panel, you can narrow down the application trace data further, by creating filters within this panel. Press PF4 to bring up the Filter(s) subpanel. This subpanel lets you select from the following filter types:
  1. Type: The event type that produced this trace entry. This parameter is an alphanumeric string, with a maximum of eight characters.
  2. Program: The name of the program that is in control when the request was initiated. This parameter is an alphanumeric string, with a maximum of eight characters.
  3. Interval: The filter interval, in seconds.
  4. Function: The function invoked by the transaction. This parameter is an alphanumeric string, with a maximum of 16 characters.
  5. Resource: The name of the CICS resource that is being acted on. This parameter is an alphanumeric string, with a maximum of 16 characters.
  6. Response: The type of response that is returned from the request that produced this entry. This parameter is an alphanumeric string, with a maximum of 12 characters
  7. Time: The time of day when the traced event occurred. This timestamp has a maximum of 19 characters.
  8. TCB Name: The MVS TCB name under which the CICS task was running when the traced event occurred. This parameter is an alphanumeric string, with a maximum of eight characters.
This specifies which column of trace data you want to filter on and displays the Filter Detail subpanel, which has four fields:
  • Column: the Filter Type you selected in the Filter(s) subpanel.
  • Compare: the comparison operator. The choices are:
    • equal to
    • not equal to
    • greater than
    • less than
    • greater than or equal to
    • less than or equal to
  • Value: The comparison value or string. A string can be used, for example, to filter for a program name. You can use the equal to and not equal to operators to search for strings containing (or not containing) specified characters. For example, if you set the Type to Function, theCompare field to <> (not equal to), and specify *NAL in the Value field; this filter would show records that do not contain a trailing string of NAL in the Function column.
  • UCTRAN: Whether or not to use automatic uppercase translation. A value of Yes forces uppercase, No leaves the fields in mixed case.

You can create multiple filters, so that the trace data are filtered on more than one column. When you do this, the filters will be shown in the Filter(s) subpanel of the CICS Task Application Trace panel.

      Filter(s)
    1. Type............................ n/a
    2. Program......................... =   DFHEDA*
    3. Interval........................ n/a
    4. Function........................ n/a
    5. Resource........................ n/a
    6. Response........................ =   NORMAL
    7. Time............................ n/a
    8. TCB Name........................ n/a
In this example, two filters are set:
  • Program = DFHEDA*
  • Response = NORMAL
The Clear All Filters button lets you remove the filters, so the CICS Task Application Trace panel will display all of the trace data.