Other sources of information

Use this topic to investigate other sources of information for problem determination.

You might find the following items of documentation useful when solving problems with IBM® MQ for z/OS®.

Your own documentation

Your own documentation is the collection of information produced by your organization about what your system and applications should do, and how they are supposed to do it. How much of this information you need depends on how familiar you are with the system or application in question, and could include:
  • Program descriptions or functional specifications
  • Flowcharts or other descriptions of the flow of activity in a system
  • Change history of a program
  • Change history of your installation
  • Statistical and monitoring profile showing average inputs, outputs, and response times

Documentation for the products you are using

The documentation for the product you are using are the InfoCenters in the IBM MQ library, and in the libraries for any other products you use with your application.

Make sure that the level of any documentation you refer to matches the level of the system you are using. Problems often arise through using either obsolete information, or information about a level of a product that is not yet installed.

Source listings and link-edit maps

Include the source listings of any applications written at your installation with your set of documentation. (They can often be the largest single element of documentation. ) Make sure that you include the relevant output from the linkage editor with your source listings to avoid wasting time trying to find your way through a load module with an out-of-date link map. Be sure to include the JCL at the beginning of your listings, to show the libraries that were used and the load library the load module was placed in.

Change log

The information in the change log can tell you of changes made in the data processing environment that might have caused problems with your application program. To get the most out of your change log, include the data concerning hardware changes, system software (such as z/OS and IBM MQ) changes, application changes, and any modifications made to operating procedures.

System configuration charts

System configuration charts show what systems are running, where they are running, and how the systems are connected to each other. They also show which IBM MQ, CICS®, or IMS systems are test systems and which are production systems.

Information from the DISPLAY CONN command

The DISPLAY CONN command provides information about which applications are connected to a queue manager, and information to help you to diagnose those that have a long-running unit of work. You could collect this information periodically and check it for any long-running units of work, and display the detailed information about that connection.