The extended status interface is designed to be a general purpose interface to obtain information from JES. Callers use the STATTYPE field to indicate the type of data they require. This SSI call returns job information and SYSOUT status information. Callers can request either terse or verbose information. Terse requests return less data but have lower overhead because no I/O is required. Verbose requests return more detailed data, but involve multiple I/O requests. For this reason, verbose requests are limited in how much data can be obtained in a single SSI invocation. See Use information for verbose requests for information about verbose requests.

In addition to the type of data being requested, there is a memory management call type (STATTYPE set to STATMEM). The extended status function SSI manages the storage needed to return data to the caller. Once the caller completes processing the returned data, a memory management call is required to free the data areas.