How CA 7 tracks internal workload on MVS using SMF?

Products

• CA 7 Workload Automation

Issue/Introduction

How does CA 7 track the progress of the work it submits?

Resolution

CA 7 tracks work that it submits using system exit points to collect SMF feedback.  SMF (Systems Management Facility) records are produced at various milestones during a job's processing (job start, step end, data set activity, and job end).

When CA 7 is initialized by the CAS9 CAIRIM procedure, exit modules SASSUJV, SASSU83 and SASSU84 are loaded, the SVC number used by CA 7 is set up, and areas are initialized to gather SMF feedback.

When CA 7 submits a job it puts an identifier (hex '31' for the CA71 instance) in column 71 of the first job card. When the IEFUJV system SMF exit is entered during JCL conversion, the CA 7 SASSUJV module gets control and looks for the identifier in the first job card to determine if this is CA 7 submitted--if so, then an area is flagged in the SMF Header Common Area for this job. It is called Common Area as these fields are common among the different SMF record types we need to collect.

Thus, when the job with the identifier in the SMF Common Area goes active and an SMF 20 type record is produced and comes through the IEFU84 SMF exit, SASSU84 sees the identifier and calls CA 7 SVC modules to collect the record.

The record is then chained in CSA and picked up by ICOM which writes the record to the communications data set which CA 7 reads and sends the job to the Active queue. The IEFU83 (and CA 7 module SASSU83) exit point is used to gather data set records.