Error Thresholds

Error thresholds influence whether or not SA z/OS recovers from an error situation. Thresholds are a number of error conditions within a certain time interval, such as five error conditions requiring restart within one hour.

During a condition that requires a restart, SA z/OS checks whether the number of occurrences of the condition reaches a defined critical threshold. If it is reached, SA z/OS does not attempt to restart the resource. You can define a critical threshold for applications to restart them.

For z/OS components, such as dump data sets or log data sets, you can define thresholds to limit how often they may be deleted after they have become full without an action being taken or a notification being sent to the operator.

Error thresholds also determine when you should be alerted to problems. The primary use of error thresholds is to track subsystem abends and ensure that the abend and restart cycle does not become an infinite loop, but you can also customize them for other uses.

The following sections show you how to define error thresholds. Information on how to display threshold settings and occurrences, and to interactively set thresholds (using the command INGTHRES) is provided in How SA z/OS Uses Error Thresholds.