Debug and Trace Facilities › Event Trace Facility (ETF)

Event Trace Facility (ETF)

The Event Trace Facility (ETF) provides a means of gathering real-time event data from key areas of the generator. Events that can be traced include function and method entry and exit, acquisition, and release of memory resources, and file access, and other types of events.

The ETF trace can be disabled, enabled in a memory-resident mode only, or written to a disk file. When disabled, the trace does not impose noticeable overhead or performance costs on the generators. When enabled in memory mode, the resulting overhead is slight.

The memory-resident, or primary trace, mode of the ETF provides a fixed-length trace table, which is overwritten in such a way that the most recent event records are retained. This table is allocated in main, or primary, memory of the process being traced. For example, if the table is defined as containing 50 events, then only the most recent 50 are retained. If after 150 events the table is formatted, the last 50 are displayed.

If the ETF has been enabled, the primary mode table is automatically formatted whenever an ABEND condition is detected. This report is automatically written to the IEF.LOGFILE file, described previously. Technical Support request this information to identify what particular circumstances caused the failure and where in CA Gen the component that the failure occurred.

In addition, the ETF can write trace records to a disk file. This allows all events that are traced to be recorded for later analysis. This mode of operation is called an auxiliary trace because the media used to store the trace data is auxiliary storage (disk or tape). The data format is written in a binary, machine-readable format to reduce overhead. Formatting must be performed using the ETFFMTX utility program.

Note: For a moderate size screen, dialog manager, or action block, the data that is produced in an auxiliary trace are many megabytes, typically from 25 through 35 MB.

You can set up ETFTRACE by selecting options on a screen or entering arguments on the TSO command line.