Diagnostic tools and information

You should find some of the following sources of information useful in problem determination.

Documentation
“Your own documentation” is the collection of information produced by your organization about what your system and applications do and how they do it. Product documentation is supplied by IBM.
Source listings and link-edit maps
Include the source listings of any applications written at your installation with your set of documentation. They often form the largest single element of documentation. Large installations with thousands of programs might prefer to keep such listings on CD-ROM.
Abend codes and error messages
Messages are sent to several transient data destinations.
Symptom strings
CICS produces symptom strings in CICS system and transaction dumps and in message DFHME0116.
Change log
The information in the change log can tell you of changes made in the data processing environment that may have caused problems with your application program.
Using dumps in problem determination
You have the choice of two different types of CICS dump to help you with problem determination. They are the transaction dump, of transaction-related storage areas, and the CICS system dump, of the entire CICS region.
Statistics
Statistics are often overlooked as a source of debugging information, but statistics that relate to an application program can help solve problems.
Monitoring
You can use CICS monitoring to provide information for debugging applications. In addition to the system-defined event monitoring points (EMPs) that already exist in CICS code itself, you can define user event monitoring points in your own application programs by using the MONITOR POINT command.
Transaction inputs and outputs
Investigating interval control waits
If you have a task that is not running and interval control seems to be involved, you can use this information to understand the possible causes.
Using CICS trace
General CICS tracing is handled by the CICS trace domain. It traces the flow of execution through CICS code, and through your applications as well. You can see what functions are being performed, which parameters are being passed, and the values of important data fields at the time trace calls are made. This type of tracing is also useful in first failure data capture, if an exception condition is detected by CICS.

Parent topic: Troubleshooting and support