Micro Focus Studio Enterprise Edition Test Server > Deployment > Configuration and Administration > Enterprise Server Configuration and Administration > Troubleshooting > Collecting Information > Dumps and Traces

Dumps and Traces

We recommend that you always run a production system with some diagnostics switched on. This is necessary so that you can troubleshoot unexpected problems. Diagnostics consume resources, and there is always contention between problem determination facilities and performance. You need to decide how important it is to be able to diagnose a problem the first time it occurs rather than having to try to recreate it or having to just turn on diagnostics and wait for it to reoccur. We suggest the following level of diagnostics as a minimum:

Turn on tracing for the application component.
Select dump on system abend.
Turn on the auxiliary trace and select a dump dataset size such that a minimum of 10 minutes of data can be held within a single trace dataset. If you set more trace points or transaction volumes increase, you will need to increase the diagnostic dataset size even more in order to achieve this objective.
Set the local trace table size to at least 70.

You might also need to turn on tracing for task control, storage control and application container components.

You specify settings for traces and internally triggered dumps on the Edit Server > Diagnostics page or the Control page of ESMAC. The trace flags on the ESMAC Control page that are equivalent to the trace flags on the Edit Server > Diagnostics page are as follows:

Edit Server > Diagnostics page	ESMAC Control page
Application	API
Task Control	KCP
Storage Control	SCP
Application Container	RTS

Settings you make on the Edit Server > Diagnostics page override those you make on the ESMAC Control page.

Dumps created when the system or a transaction abends are internally triggered dumps; as long as you have selected them on the Control page, they will be created when abends occur. You can also obtain an externally triggered dump, that is, a dump that is taken immediately in response to a command. There are several ways of initiating an externally triggered dump:

Click Create Dump on the Edit Server > Diagnostics > Dump page
Click Dump on the ESMAC Control page
Run the command casdump; for more information see the help topic casdump.

The casdump command gives you more flexibility.

Note: Note:

casdump will not work if the Directory Server is running as a system service and you started the server from the Enterprise Server Administration interface, because the server will not be running under your user ID; in order for casdump to work you must do one of:

Run the Directory Server under your own user ID; see the section Starting and Stopping in the chapter Introduction to Enterprise Server Administration.
Run the Directory Server as a system service, but start the enterprise server using the command casstart (see the help topic casstart).
Run the Directory Server as a system service, but change the system service definition to use your user ID rather than LOCAL_SYSTEM. Note that this will prevent the enterprise server console window from being displayed; you can still view the console from the Administration Interface.

First run casdump as follows:

casdump /res-name

By default, casdump attempts to lock shared memory before creating the dump. If enterprise server fails in a way that leaves shared memory locked, the command might hang.

If the command hangs, you can run it again with the /d option:

casdump /res-name /d

Using /d means "do not lock shared memory". This could also cause the command to fail due to shared memory being changed by the running enterprise server while casdump is chasing and dumping storage chains.

Alternatively, use the /b option which dumps all of shared memory as a block at the very beginning before it starts to chase chains and format blocks.

If you are planning to send the dump file to Micro Focus for investigation, you might also be asked to run the command with the /f option; this option dumps the FAQE chain (Free Area Queue Element) and shared memory as a block.

An externally triggered dump is written to the dump X dataset, casdumpx.rec, if you specify the /d option, or the current dump dataset casdumpa.rec or casdumpb.rec if you do not specify it.