Enabling system dumps for some CICS messages

There are occasions when you might need diagnostic information for an event that causes a message to be sent, but does not normally cause CICS® to take a system dump. You can enable system dumping for some CICS messages that do not normally cause CICS to take a system dump.

Before you begin

To determine which messages you can do this for, look in CICS messages. If the message you are interested in has a 2-character alphabetic component ID after the DFH prefix, and it has either XMEOUT global user exit parameters, or a destination of Terminal User, you can use it to construct a system dump code to add to the dump table.

About this task

You cannot enable dumping for messages that do not have the characteristics described earlier. For example, some messages that are issued early during initialization cannot be used to cause CICS to take a system dump, because the mechanisms that control dumping might not be initialized at that time. Also, you cannot enable dumping for the message domain's own messages (they are prefixed by DFHME) where they do not normally cause CICS to take a system dump.

Procedure

  1. Add the dump code (constructed by removing the DFH prefix from the message number) to the system dump table.
  2. Specify the SYSDUMP option.

Results

CICS then causes a system dump to be taken when the message is issued.