No apology needed, One of the reasons for this forum is to learn.

Analyzing standalone dumps is similar to console dumps. Standalone dumps are 
very rare and are only used in extreme situations (e.g. console dump command 
does not work or system in spin loop). In my past life as a sysprog, the only 
time I took standalone dumps was to verify it was working. In product support 
and product development, we only request this as a last resort because it's 
disruptive. I've never looked at one because console dumps and slip dumps were 
available and sufficient.

Standalone dumps and console dumps are not caused by an event (e.g. abends or 
slip traps). In this case, the problem task might not be active on a CPU. In 
this case, you don't have module names unless you look them up directly. You 
only know the symptoms that caused you to take the dump. For vendor software 
problems, it's unlikely sysprogs will be able to analyze the dump because it 
usually requires internal control block knowledge that a sysprog won't have 
access. For inhouse program problems, then a sysprog would analyze the dump 
according to the symptoms and control block information. .

Some of the common things sysprogs could analyze in console dumps:
1. IP VERBX LOGDATA formats the logrec data. Software and hardware errors are 
logged here.
2. IP VERBX MTRACE formats the console log messages. Maybe there is an error 
message.
3. If there is a program looping, then displaying TCBTTIME might show the TCB 
that is using a lot of CPU time.
4. If you know the looping TCB, then you can look at the RB's for that TCB to 
see the PSW's. IP WHERE xxx. will show you the load module name and offset for 
the PSW address. If you are real lucky, then SYSTRACE might show some of the 
instructions which are looping.

There is probably more that could be easily reviewed by sysprogs but it really 
depends upon the problem symptoms..

Jon Perryman.

>________________________________
> From: Jake anderson <[email protected]>
>
>Apology for my ignorance. Does it apply same for analysing Z/OS Standalone
>Dump ?
>

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