Handling environmental and system errors

With environmental errors, often your first action should be to rerun your program or retry the request one or more times. The following are examples of environmental errors where rerunning your program or retrying the request is appropriate:

The request being made through the service exceeds some internal system limit. Sometimes, rerunning your program or retrying the request results in successful completion. If the problem persists, it might be an indication of a larger problem requiring you to consult your system programmer, or possibly IBM® support personnel. Your system programmer might be able to tune the system or cancel users so that the limit is no longer exceeded.
The request exceeds an installation-defined limit. If the problem persists, the action might be to contact your system programmer and request that a specification in an installation exit or parmlib member be modified.
The system cannot obtain storage, or some other resource, for your request. If the problem persists, the action might be to check with the operator to see if another user in the installation is causing the problem, or to see if the entire installation is experiencing storage constraint problems.

You might be able to design your program to anticipate certain environmental errors and handle them dynamically.

With system errors, as with environmental errors, often your first action should be to rerun your program or retry the request one or more times. If the problem persists, you might have to contact IBM support personnel.

Whenever possible for environmental and system errors, the return or reason code description gives you either a specific action you can take, or a list of recommended actions you can try.

For some errors, providing a specific action is not possible, because the action you should take depends on your particular application, and on what is happening in your installation. In those cases, the return or reason code description gives you one or more possible causes of the error to help you to determine what action to take.

Some system errors result in return and reason codes that are provided for IBM diagnostic purposes only. In these cases, the return or reason code description asks you to record the information and provide it to the appropriate IBM support personnel.