Serena StarTool DA CICS - CICS Dump Analyzer
eBusiness demands that online systems be available on a 24x7 basis. A critical failure in an eBusiness application can mean the loss of millions of dollars; the need to quickly determine and correct faults in applications has reached the highest priority.
Serena StarTool DA CICS, CICS Dump Analyzer, (formerly known as StarSpy/CICS) offers powerful functionality to solve CICS problems. With Serena StarTool DA CICS, you can monitor your CICS abend history through summary and detailed management screens. You can isolate faults to the failing instruction down to the source code level. Serena StarTool DA CICS allows you to easily track trends and service levels of the online CICS applications, thereby increasing productivity of your programming staff and increasing the uptime of critical eBusiness applications.
Serena StarTool DA CICS Offers Enterprise OS/390 Functionality
Serena StarTool DA CICS is a full-featured CICS dump management, notification, distribution, and analysis system for both system and transaction abends. All dumps normally requested by CICS as well as all normal transaction dumps are supported by Serena StarTool DA CICS. When a dump is taken, Serena StarTool DA CICS provides the functions needed to quickly debug the problem. It provides the notifications, an easy-to-use point-and-shoot capability, failing instruction identification, and CICS screen capture. It provides the management needed to archive and retrieve dumps and to monitor trends over time to deliver the high availability required for today's eBusiness application.
Screen Capture and Soft Landing
Serena StarTool DA CICS captures the active CICS screen at the time of the abend so that the analyst can associate the user activity with the abend. At this point, the analyst can dump the contents of the associated variables, registers and other memory. The analyst can then allow the program to continue executing through a facility called Soft Landing. This capability delivers the information needed to solve even the most complex CICS problems.
Source-Level Debugging
Serena StarTool DA CICS supports assembler and all versions of COBOL. Serena StarTool DA CICS provides extensive support for COBOL and Assembler languages. Special features included in Serena StarTool DA CICS speed up the debugging effort for applications written in these languages.
With Serena StarTool DA CICS, you can immediately see the actual library level source that corresponds to a set of instructions. For example, for a COBOL program and a given hex area in a dump, hit a PF key to look at the assembler code, hit another PF key to look at the output COBOL from the compiler, and hit another PF key to look at the COBOL input statements. This true level source may be an EXEC CICS statement, a simple COBOL verb or it may be a Copy statement. This facility allows the programmer to quickly find the real source code statement to change and correct the problem.
Extensive COBOL Support
Serena StarTool DA CICS lets you put the cursor on any COBOL source instruction before or including the abending one, and will display the contents of the data items used in that instruction. Serena StarTool DA CICS lets you look at the contents of any working storage area in the dump by using and seeing the COBOL source statement definition. Uninitiated or invalid data areas, indexes and subscripts are easily found. Since the values of these items are frozen at abend time, this information can be crucial in solving the problem as fast as possible.
Interactive Installation
Serena StarTool DA CICS is installed with ISPF so you can interactively configure a Serena StarTool DA CICS complex with everything tailored to your needs and your CICS configurations. This eases the management of parameters, and allows Serena StarTool DA CICS to fit into your problem management processes.
Alerts and Notification
Serena StarTool DA CICS instantly alerts any designated responsible person of an abend and saves all vital information for immediate problem analysis. Users can be notified and dumps can be routed using any combination of TSO, CICS user- ids, CICS Term-ID and email systems.
Extensive Online Help
Serena StarTool DA CICS provides extensive online help capabilities. Using ISPF screens, users can get the information needed to quickly understand the significance of parameters. In addition, the "find" and "search" commands can be used to quickly find specific information or text strings in a dump.
Flexible Dump Database Index Support
Serena StarTool DA CICS can store up to 16 Serena StarTool DA CICS image dumps and 32 CICS address space dumps per index. Each dump is automatically separated into its own file. This feature provides the flexibility for Serena StarTool DA CICS to easily integrate into the CICS configuration that you have running in your environment. You set up the number of indices based on how you manage the CICS regions in your environment.
Use Serena StarTool Products for a Full Solution
Serena StarTool is a family of products that provide extensive support for enhancing OS/390 application availability. This set of products address key areas in the life cycle of an application, including the areas of File and Data Management, Testing and Debugging, Fault Diagnostics, and Performance Monitoring and Improvement. This suite of products automate the most common and re-occuring programming tasks in the successful implementation and operation of eBusiness applications on the OS/390 platform.
StarTool is a registered trademark of SERENA Software, Inc. Serena is a trademark of SERENA Software, Inc. All other products or company names are used for identification purposes only, and may be trademarks of their respective owners.