IBM Mainframe Forum

Hi,
I am working on a tool which takes Log files and reverse engineers them in to activity/senario diagrams. This comes very handy when there are multiple calls or multi-tier architecture. Am able to process distributed systems logs successfully and trying to do it with Mainframe logs. Need help on:

1. Is something like this already available in the market (free or paid)? I did not find any. So please point me towards.
2. Based on my experience of Mainframes, JES logs just speaks about a particular job. I need something which talks about interactions with distributed systems, calls with in mainframes (programs being called, transactions occured, etc.). Basically communication. I feel SMF files would be able to provide this and more information to me. Pls correct me if this not right.
3. Can you please share or point me to, some SMF files. I believe types, 100-105, 110, 115, 116 would be of help. Not sure if I will be able to Digest info available in Types lower than these. You can suggest something else as well.

My organization doesn't have mainframe and quite tricky to ask Clients for these files.

All help / suggestions are welcome.

3. Can you please share or point me to, some SMF files. I believe types, 100-105, 110, 115, 116 would be of help. Not sure if I will be able to Digest info available in Types lower than these. You can suggest something else as well.

pretty unreasonable/improper request....

if You cannot ask Your clients, there is no reason for anybody to smuggle their data to You/Your company
doing so will certainly be cause for lawful termination.

when IBM was given customer performance data to be analyzed
quite a bit of papers had to be signed for NDA of confidential data .

if You/Your organization can sign such paper there should be no issues raised by Your clients.

Thanks Enrico for the response. I did not say I can't ask, What I said is it's tricky. You have made the point that it requires signing of papers to get such files. So before getting in to such exercise I would like to see if the files contain information which I am looking for and is it feasible to use them. If the file contents solves my purpose then I would definitely talk to Clients and get bunch of files. This would avoid unnecessary signing of Papers and save time for many of the persons involved in case this doesn't work out. I hope this makes sense. Do let me know your comments.

Transfering SMF data can be fairly difficult; it is volumnious, to say the least, and transfer agents suck as FTP will not send it in a way that it can be used on the receiving platform without some pre send massaging. Before you start trying to get this data you better

• Have a plan in place to massage the data so it can be used on your platform after it has been received.
• It appears you have taken a quick look through the SMF manual. I think you should go back and start to think about how the data can be used in your application. I'm not saying you should be writing any code, but you should be thinking about how the data can be massaged for your end purpose.

Thanks Steve. I agree with your valuable suggestion. Unfortunately I have not seen the SMF file as of now. Do not know how it looks like, what format and what it contains. That's the reason I am asking for a small sample to get face to face with what lies ahead. Very small sample of each one of the files and will try to make it readable and then see what useful (for my work) information it contains.
In case you feel I am getting in to too much by using SMF files then pls suggest some other files where I can get required details.

Thanks Steve. I agree with your valuable suggestion. Unfortunately I have not seen the SMF file as of now. Do not know how it looks like, what format and what it contains. That's the reason I am asking for a small sample to get face to face with what lies ahead. Very small sample of each one of the files and will try to make it readable and then see what useful (for my work) information it contains.
In case you feel I am getting in to too much by using SMF files then pls suggest some other files where I can get required details.

look here for the layout of the SMF records
http://publibz.boulder.ibm.com/cgi-bin/ ... 0114021602
not the latest ones but more than enough to get You started

You can search for the more current ones starting from here
http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/os/zos/ ... index.html

and here for the layout of the CICS records
http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocente ... fha37q.htm

anoop76_99 wrote:Thanks Steve. I agree with your valuable suggestion. Unfortunately I have not seen the SMF file as of now. Do not know how it looks like, what format and what it contains. That's the reason I am asking for a small sample to get face to face with what lies ahead. Very small sample of each one of the files and will try to make it readable and then see what useful (for my work) information it contains.
In case you feel I am getting in to too much by using SMF files then pls suggest some other files where I can get required details.

Looking at raw SMF data with no idea what it's supposed to look like is an exercise in frustration. Believe me. Been there. Done that. All too often, with the manual in front of me and looking at a record dump I've gotten lost. Look here -The first column is a hexadecimal offset, the second column is a decimal offset. The 00120000 is what is called an RDW; the first two bytes are the record length. The first byte in 1E02 is flags that I've never bothered with, the 02 is the record type. In essentially all SMF records, the 001176E4 is the time of day, expressed in binary with a nominal resolution of 1/100th of a second. The 0113089F is a date, as a packed decimal date in the format 0cyyddd. The F at the end is a packed decimal sign. The remainder is record type 2 data, whatever that is.

Remember I told you you must arrange for the data to be massaged before you try to send it by FTP. If you attempt to send SMF data as binary data the RDWs are not sent and it will not be possible to put humpty together. The program that created the record dump in the code block shows the RDW.

Hello,

To echo what Steve has mentioned, going at the raw SMF data is tough for people who know what the data represents (i.e. they are rather familiar with the internal working of the mainframe). Even "knowing" about the data, it is still tedius as the data was not meant for human consumption. I recommend you talk with the mainframe people who support the system(s) you need to monitor and quite possibly they already have an extract of the info you want/need. If you intend to perform this analysis on some non-mainframe system, one issue will probably trying to download "all" of the smf data. It is Quite Large. Most organizations consider the raw smf data to be proprietary informatnio and are reluctant to have it on some other system (except possibly IBM for some kind of problem resolution).