First-failure data capture

 

The i5/OS® operating system provides a way for you to capture and report error information for the distributed relational database. This function is called first-failure data capture (FFDC).

The primary purpose of FFDC support is to provide extensive information on errors detected in the DDM components of the i5/OS operating system from which an Authorized Program Analysis Report (APAR) can be created.

You can also use this function to help you diagnose some system-related application problems. By means of this function, key structures and the DDM data stream are automatically dumped to the spooled file. The goal of this automatic dumping of error information on the first occurrence of an error is to minimize the need to have to create the failure again to report it for service support. FFDC is active in both the application requester and the application server.

One thing you should keep in mind is that not all negative SQLCODEs result in dumps; only those that might indicate an APAR situation are dumped.

 

Parent topic:

Interpreting trace job and first-failure data capture data