What Trace and Dumps has in store for you

TX Series provide features like trace and dumps .So lets take a look what trace and dumps have information about. The easiest way to enable trace is in regions environment file put CICSTRACE=1 .This will help you in generating your trace file in var/cics_regions/region name/dumps/dir1 . In this directory the trace files of various processes like cicsas,cicsam,cicspcor cicsip will be there . The details can be seen  when you format these file like by using cicstfmt <file name>.This will generate a file which is in readable format .fmt . cicspc file is generate when we use IPIC and cicsip is generated if we use TCP/IP .So now the question arises how to search the important information in the huge pool of data kept in these trace files .The data that is sent to the other region is stored in outbound datastream region and the data which is received from other region is kept in inbound datastream So we can simple use the commands
grep "cicsip outbound datastream" *.fmt
grep "cicsip inbound datastream " *.fmt

Trace and dumps store all information regarding the connection,port,IP address .More details can be found in Dumps.Similarily we ganerate dumps by doing
1) cicslterm -r <region name>
2) CEMT SET DUMP ON
3) CEMT PERFORM SNAP DUMP

This will generate the dumps file in dumps/dir1 directory of region .To format dumps we will use cicsdfmt <file name>.There also we can find the details about the communication .Therefore it becomes  a lot more easier to find the details of communication and in case of any problems or information we can analyze these trace and dumps files.