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Job Abends

Analysis of job abends can tell you much about how the data center is run. If you find many operator cancel commands, it can indicate that operators are confused about what to run or when to run it. Timeouts (such as S522s or S722s) can indicate that people are leaving their TSO terminals unattended or that operators are not satisfying tape mounts in a timely fashion. Any of the S0Cs series of abends for production programs (particularly S0C7s) can indicate insufficient quality assurance was performed before a program was placed into production.

You should be aware, however, that the absence of an abend is not always an indication that a program ended normally. z/OS gives programs a way of trapping abends and preventing termination in most cases. The SPIE macro traps the 0Cx series of program interruptions and the STAE macro traps most system‑generated abends. In z/OS, the extended SPIE and extended STAE macros (ESPIE and ESTAE) are also available. Therefore, some programs might not terminate when errors are detected. CA Auditor itself uses this technique to continue running, even if an error occurs in one of its modules.

Some programming languages (such as PL/1) make extensive use of SPIE and STAE to trap errors. This is how the PL/1 “On Error” block gains control in the event of problems. Some data centers choose to use PL/1 with SPIE turned on, but STAE can be turned off. This permits “On Error” to catch program interruptions, but not system‑generated abends. Therefore, analysis of abends for PL/1 programs should be approached carefully.