Introduction › About the Product

About the Product

CA SymDump for CICS is a powerful online tool that brings application dumps back to life. CA SymDump for CICS improves your ability to analyze and resolve application program problems.

Ideally, you could monitor every program and catch every error with a product like CA InterTest for CICS. Realistically, this is not possible either because of overhead or because you may not want to monitor security programs or programs using nonstandard code. As a result, dumps occur—especially in production where even a thoroughly debugged program abends because of bad data, scheduling errors, invalid parameters, and many other factors beyond programmer control.

With CA SymDump for CICS, you can do the following actions:

• Analyze dumps symbolically to resolve application dumps that occur in production and test systems. You can then solve these problems easily online using the Source Listing Dump Analysis screen. When examining a dump using this screen, your source listing displays at the instruction that triggered the abend. For more information on performing symbolic dump analysis and using the Source Listing Dump Analysis screen, see the chapter "Working with Dumps."
• Locate problems easily when you do not have a symbolic dump. Use the CA SymDump for CICS Abend Analysis display to avoid having to analyze hexadecimal dumps. This display pinpoints the instruction that caused the abend, explains the nature of the abend, and gives you simple and quick access to the instruction and its operands in main storage. For details, see the chapter "Working with Dumps."
• Immediately resolve CICS production problems from any region; for example, debug production abends from your test region. With CA SymDump for CICS you can analyze the dump online to resolve the problem promptly, without using a monitoring facility. For details, see the chapter "Production Strategies."
• Easily display a wide range of data about your dump through formatted and main storage displays. For more information, see the chapter "Working with Dumps."
• Manage your dump data set so you can selectively retain, view, and print the dumps you need, and discard the ones you do not. For instructions on managing dumps, see the chapter "Working with Dumps."

  Note: For information on how CA SymDump for CICS works with your CICS dump data set, see the Installation Guide.

• Reference your program's symbolic listing easily. CA SymDump for CICS lets you maintain multiple symbolic listings for a program and decide how much of the listing to keep on the symbolic file. CA SymDump for CICS symbolic file management saves valuable disk space since the listings are compressed. For information on managing your symbolic information, see the Installation Guide.
• Capture and review the CICS Internal Trace table. For details, see the chapter "Production Strategies."

  Note: The CA SymDump for CICS trace capture facility is very powerful. You can use it in place of the CICS Auxiliary Trace to analyze the CICS workload and quickly pinpoint any problems.

Because CA SymDump for CICS and CA InterTest for CICS are completely integrated, you can access any CA InterTest for CICS function from within CA SymDump for CICS. For example, while using CA SymDump for CICS to analyze a dump you can access CA InterTest for CICS to set breakpoints whenever the need arises.