IBM Mainframe Forum

[cresg820]

hi everyone,
i need to read ca7 log files for monitoring purposes and send data via ftp to an external server but i have some doubts:
1) if i continously read the LOGP and LOGS files, supose every 5 minutes, could i annoy or slow ca7 ?
2) there is a method to make a "tail" on ca7 logp/logs files?

Thanks

[Robert Sample]

Both of your questions would be best answered by the vendor. CA has a support site for which you can register as long as your site is licensed for CA products. CA has an extensive knowledge base on their support web site and are good at answering questions, as well.

I don't understand the purpose of what you are doing. If you are wanting to monitor to send job failure notification emails, why not use the email notification feature ALREADY built into CA-7? If you are monitoring for some other purpose, why would it not be possible to trigger an email job instead of potentially disrupting CA-7 by processing its log files with an outside program?

[cresg820]

thank for the answer,
the reason that i need to read continuously logs files is that i need to get all events in the ca7 like: job start, job end, job abend, force complete and so on.

there is another way to notify events from ca7 instead of emails? like smtp, another log file, mq? Emails are not good because events are processed by an external application on a server.

and how about the second question? can i make a tail operation on a dataset?

thank you

[Robert Sample]

Tail is a Unix command. Unix commands, unless specially formulated to work with z/OS files, don't tend to do well with z/OS files. CA-7 logs are z/OS files. I strongly suspect you will find that tail does nothing with the CA-7 log files. And yes, there are a primary and secondary log file so CA-7 can dump one while using the other one so merely using tail on one file, even if it worked, still loses you half the data.

i need to get all events in the ca7 like: job start, job end, job abend, force complete and so on.

What is so special about your site that it cannot do what all the other CA-7 sites do and use the montioring screens already a part of CA-7 to monitor jobs?

The format of the CA-7 log files is proprietary to CA and I doubt you will be able to get any information about their format from CA or anywhere else. CA writes a maximum of 2100 bytes per line, so you'll need to plan on spending a while to decipher the various fields. And if CA finds out you are doing so, they may well call this reverse engineering and they could pull your site license for CA-7 (and possibly all other CA products, depending upon your site agreement with CA). Your site may want to get permission from CA before going much further with whatever project you think you've been assigned to do, to prevent license issues.

[cresg820]

For license i'll ask to my sysadmin. I take a look to the ca7 log file and i don't have any problem to get informations that i need. Any how I could use ca7 utilities to extract data and not parse log files manually so i don't do reverse engineering.
If I have some problems with ca7 logs files i think to use batch terminal commands or i'll invent something else. But i prefer read log files.

With "monitoring screeens" you intend commands like "list", "lprrn", "ljob" or something else? This commands are great we need more in our site.

about this:
there is another way to notify events from ca7 instead of emails? like smtp, another log file, mq?

thank you

[Robert Sample]

For monitoring I was thinking of the XQM and XQJ screens, but any of the QM screens in general monitor CA-7.

Have you looked at a CA-7 log yet? They are filled with non-display data (even the date is packed decimal and the time is binary coded decimal). Further, a CA-7 log has a start date / time and continues to add records to the end until the log is cleared by a system programmer running a specific job. So you might have to ignore several thousand entries to get to the ones you want. I haven't looked at the Earl jobs to see if any of them will read the log data sets.

You would need to contact CA to determine if there is another mechanism available for event notification. http://www.ca.com/us/Support.aspx is the US support site. You can talk to their support people and find out what you can -- and cannot -- do with regard to event notification and the log data sets.

[cresg820]

all defaults ca7 functions are not sufficient for us. In our site there are something like 50k jobs and 80k connections.
I don't have problems to parse ca7 log files. I know what to keep and what to remove.
I also take a look to SASSHIS8 that can parse log for me.

I'll try to contact ca support.

Thank you very much for all answers.