Enabling trace in communication stubs

You can enable application user trace in the communication stubs for application development and problem determination.

Enabling trace in the communication stub for CICS

The communication stub for CICS® uses the trace facilities of the CICS region in which it runs. The trace is implemented as CICS application user trace. To turn on CICS trace, use the supplied CETR transaction. For more information, see CETR - trace control.

To trace the communication stub for CICS, set the Main User Trace flag to on and ensure the Application Programming(AP) component standard trace is enabled. In addition to AP, it is good practice to also enable the standard trace for the Socket(SO) and Web(WB) components. After trace is generated, use the CICS trace utility program to format the output.

The communication stub for CICS uses trace point ID: AP 00A1.

The following example for formatting CICS auxiliary trace uses the trace utility program supplied by CICS Transaction Server for z/OS® version 5.6. For more information, see CICS Trace utility program DFHTU730.

//PRTRACE JOB MSGCLASS=H,REGION=500M
//PRINT EXEC PGM=DFHTU730
//STEPLIB DD DSN=CTS560.CICS730.SDFHLOAD,DISP=SHR
// DD DSN=CTS560.CICS730.SDFHLINK,DISP=SHR
//DFHAUXT DD DSN=<aux_trace_hlq>.DFHAUXT,DISP=SHR
//DFHAXPRT DD SYSOUT=A
//DFHAXPRM DD *
FULL,TYPETR=(AP00A1,WB0000-FFFF,SO0000-FFFF)
/*

The formatted trace entries generated by the communication stub for CICS are identified by the text:

AP 00A1 USER EVENT APPLICATION-PROGRAM-ENTRY BAQCSTUB

Enabling trace in the communication stub for IMS and z/OS

The communication stub for IMS and z/OS provides different levels for the verbose diagnostic logging capability. You enable and configure the logging capability with the environment variable BAQVERBOSE followed by the required level.

Trace messages are directed to the standard output for the application environment. By default, verbose messages are turned off.

CAUTION:

If you use the settings ON or ALL, the trace output might contain sensitive information.

Available levels and their usage are:

OFF: Turns off verbose trace messages (the default). No trace messages are produced.
ON: Turns on verbose trace messages. Most messages are written, including messages for entry, exit, errors, and auditing. To investigate any issues in the API requester stub code for IMS and batch, enable this level of trace.
ERROR: If an error occurs within the stub code, whether an internal error or by bad data being passed, messages are written to the output destination.
AUDIT: Records the entry and exit to stub and third-party libraries such as the HWT. This level is useful to track the timing of events such as entry and exit to the stub code, and timing of request and response through the HWT.
ALL: All diagnostic messages are written, including previous levels and intensive trace. This can include string conversions, setters, lookup tables etc. This level may cause a performance impact so it is not advisable unless there is an issue in one of the areas that writes at this level.

For example, BAQVERBOSE=ON.