Job Archiving solution overview

During job processing, Control-D collects each report produced by the job into an individual CDAM dataset, and also creates an entry in the Active User File for each report. In addition to business reports, every job running on a z/OS system produces three system Sysout datasets (referred by DD names JESMSGLG, JESJCL, and JESYSMSG) to the JES output class specified in the MSGCLASS parameter of the JOB card. Any other Sysout datasets in the job, defined by DD statements that use SYSOUT=*, are also written to this class.

Business reports are relatively large, so the data can be managed efficiently by allocating individual CDAM datasets for each report. The MSGCLASS output, on the other hand, is usually relatively small, and it would be more efficient to combine multiple MSGCLASS reports into a single CDAM dataset. In addition, it is desirable to reduce the number of report entries created for the MSGCLASS output and instead use indexes to access the desired information.

The Job Archiving solution addresses the collection, management, and access to job system output. As a common practice, various categories of jobs (for example, production, testing, or development) are assigned specific Sysout classes for their MSGCLASS output. Control-D uses generic decollation missions to automatically decollate the output from these classes. The output of all jobs selected by one of these missions is accumulated in a single CDAM dataset, and a report entry and index are created for each job. If, for example, 1,000 jobs are collected by a single mission, 1,000 report entries are stored in a single CDAM data set.

To achieve more efficient output management, these report entries are further processed by the CTVJAR utility, resulting in significantly fewer report entries. CTVJAR consolidates all report entries created by each of the generic decollation missions into a single report entry with indexes for each job and sub-indexes for each Sysout dataset. The resulting structure is similar to the following example:

After the reports are consolidated, you can use the CTDDELRP utility to perform a daily cleanup of the original report entries and index files.

A special display option for the user entry panel is available for quick access to the Job MSGCLASS output.