Tracing with the AIX system trace

In addition to the WebSphere® MQ trace, WebSphere MQ for AIX® users can use the standard AIX system trace.

AIX system tracing is a two-step process:

Gathering the data
Formatting the results

WebSphere MQ uses two trace hook identifiers:

X'30D': This event is recorded by WebSphere MQ on entry to or exit from a subroutine.
X'30E': This event is recorded by WebSphere MQ to trace data such as that being sent or received across a communications network.

Trace provides detailed execution tracing to help you to analyze problems. IBM® service support personnel might ask for a problem to be re-created with trace enabled. The files produced by trace can be very large so it is important to qualify a trace, where possible. For example, you can optionally qualify a trace by time and by component.

There are two ways to run trace:

Interactively.
The following sequence of commands runs an interactive trace on the program myprog and ends the trace.
```
trace -j30D,30E -o trace.file
->!myprog
->q
```
Asynchronously.
The following sequence of commands runs an asynchronous trace on the program myprog and ends the trace.
```
trace -a -j30D,30E -o trace.file
myprog
trcstop
```

You can format the trace file with the command:


trcrpt -t MQ_INSTALLATION_PATH/lib/amqtrc.fmt trace.file > report.file

MQ_INSTALLATION_PATH represents the high-level directory in which WebSphere MQ is installed.

report.file is the name of the file where you want to put the formatted trace output.

Note: All WebSphere MQ activity on the machine is traced while the trace is active.