An installation's programmers can write authorized or unauthorized applications that detect and collect information about errors in their processing. Through the SYMRBLD or SYMREC macro, the applications can write a symptom record for each error to the logrec data set, the online repository where MVS™ collects error information. Programmers can analyze the records in the logrec data set to diagnose and debug problems in the installation's applications.
The unit of information stored in the logrec data set is called a symptom record. The data in the symptom record is a description of some programming failure combined with a description of the environment where the failure occurred. Some of the information in the symptom record is in a special format called the structured data base (SDB) format.