System and method for accessing server information

A method for reading a CICS internal trace, the method comprises the steps of

• 1. locating CICS regions on the logical partition (LPAR);
• 2. establishing a recovery (ESTAE) environment to detect and recover from abnormal endings (ABENDs) that occur if a CICS region suddenly becomes unavailable;
• 3. establishing AR-mode cross-memory access to the CICS address space to access the control blocks of CICS and the internal trace that resides inside the CICS address space;
• 4. verifying that the CICS address space is an active and eligible CICS region;
• 5. locating the current internal trace buffer;
• 6. iteratively repeating steps 3 to 5 until all CICS region have been read;
• 7. reading the traces entries of the internal trace for each of the CICS regions.

A method for reconstructing an application lifecycle view of transactions processed by a transaction server having first memory means for storing trace entries generated during transaction processing, the method comprises the steps of:

• 1. reading via a first processing means trace entries generated by the transaction server during processing of the transaction and written to an internal trace of the transaction server;
• 2. passing the trace entries to a second processing means,
• 3. reconstructing via a second processing means the application lifecycle of the transaction processed by the server using the trace entries read by the first processing means;
• 4. passing the reconstructed application lifecycle to a third processing means;
• and
• 5. writing via the third processing means the reconstructed application lifecycle to second memory means.

A method for taking a snapshot of an entire internal trace of one or more transaction server regions at a particular moment of time;

• the method comprises the steps of:
• 1. locating CICS regions on the logical partition (LPAR) by following the address space control block (ASID/ASCB) chain using the standard technique for locating multiple virtual storage (MVS) address spaces;
• 2. establishing a recovery (ESTAE) environment to detect and recover from abnormal endings (ABENDs) that occur if a CICS region suddenly becomes unavailable due to being shut down;
• 3. establishing AR-mode cross-memory access to the CICS address space to access the control blocks of CICS and the internal trace that reside inside the CICS address space:
• 4. verifying that the CICS address space is an active and eligible CICS region;
• 5. locating the oldest internal trace buffer which immediately follows the active internal trace buffer (the buffer that is currently being written to by the transaction server) to establish the starting point (current internal trace buffer) of the snapshot;
• 6. writing the trace entries stored in the current internal trace buffer to the auxiliary trace data set;
• 7. positioning of the “current internal trace buffer” to the “next trace buffer”;
• and
• 8. iteratively repeating steps 1 to 7 until positioning is back to the original “starting point” and one circuit of the internal trace has been completed meaning that the snap-shot process is complete and the auxiliary trace data set is closed and available for use.

A method for obtaining information about particular application and/or system events, and exception conditions generated during processing of a computer program or a transaction and stored in a CICS internal trace in the form of trace entries, the method comprises the steps of:

• 1. reading the CICS internal trace to obtain the trace entries;
• 2. storing the trace entries in memory means;
• and
• 3. reading the memory means to obtain information about particular application and/or system events, and exception conditions generated during processing of a computer program or a transaction