IBM z/OS Management Facility

Problem data management

When problems occur, the task of gathering diagnostic data to be sent to IBM® or another vendor's support team can be very time-consuming. You need to reduce risk to the business and get to the root of the problem quickly.

The z/OS® Management Facility Incident Log capability (introduced with z/OSMF V1R11) is intended to facilitate problem data management tasks for new or less skilled system programmers and system administrators. It can also provide procedural advantages for the experienced system programmer by providing an event log summary and detailed view of z/OS incidents. The initial focus of an incident is on Abend and user initiated SVC dumps.

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The Incident Log provides a consolidated list of SVC related incidents, along with details and diagnostic data captured with each incident. It also facilitates sending the data for further diagnostics. The Incident Log can mean fewer errors while obtaining, aggregating and sending data to IBM, or an ISV, and can result in faster diagnosis and higher system availability.

For example, what once may have taken 20-30 minutes plus a high degree of skill to collect and package diagnostic data, now can take as little as 30 seconds.

Recognizing that a system detected problem occurred, may take 5-6 minutes today, requiring multiple manual steps and skills on how to extract the right data; but with z/OSMF Incident Log it can take as little as a couple of seconds, or a single click, to display the list of incidents.

For z/OSMF V1R12, the Incident Log now supports parallel encrypted FTP to IBM which can break dumps into multiple data sets that can be sent via FTP in parallel to reduce transmission time. Additional Incident Log updates include: associating additional data as attachments to an incident, adding free-form notes to the incident, and a function to display FTP status. Incident Log is available starting with z/OS Management Facility V1R11 and z/OS V1R10 (with maintenance).

For z/OSMF V1R13, the Incident Log is updated with improved incident management and data send capabilities with the introduction of a new APAR search string, new view job status (via SDSF launch), and utilization of the new Problem Documentation Upload utility in the base of z/OS V1R13.