ABend-Catcher

ABend-Catcher soft-lands users back to a known starting place...

When abends occur, do your users crash-land into raw CICS? Let ABend-Catcher soft-land them back to a known starting place, and inform them of the type of abend in English.

Just as important, with ABend-Catcher you can quickly find out what the user was doing at the moment the abend occurred. By capturing the complete screen, it allows full retrieval and review of the problem at another terminal at any time, even after the dump dataset has been erased.

Review and resolve abends quickly and easily

ABend-Catcher provides immediate notification and tracking of abends that would otherwise go undetected without printing the CICS dump dataset. You won't have to wait hours while the problem becomes more severe, to know that an abend occurred.

You also won't have to hope that the user remembers what he was doing. ABend-Catcher automatically retains failure information in a VSAM dataset and keeps it on file with the user's screen.

You'll save hours of valuable programming time, because you won't have to review all of your CICS dumps to locate the problem. You can even review and prioritize abends by date and time, transaction ID, or terminal ID. And when trivial abends occur, you can turn off the dumps and save resources, time, and paper.

ABend-Catcher also computes offsets within the program which created the abend, to point directly at the failure.

Program testing made easy

Before programs are released to end users, try ABend-Catcher in the testing environment. It silently monitors test transactions and jumps in only when an abend occurs. This makes it possible to run tests without an active debugging tool.

Improve communications in the quality assurance stage

ABend-Catcher records the screen and comments of the tester for programmer review and resolution. The tester no longer has to make screen copies and hand written notes to pass back to the programmer.

Technical and nontechnical screens

ABend-Catcher gives you a choice of a technical information screen for technical users, or a nontechnical screen for nontechnical users. Either way, all technical information, user comments, and the screen itself are kept on file for programmer review.

Statistical quality assurance

ABend-Catcher accumulates statistics on all abends, and has reporting capabilities to let you know how often each type of problem occurs. Statistical data can be broken down by user, program, abend code, transaction, dates, etc. This allows you to assign maintenance resources where they'll do the most good.

For more information, contact your CASI representative.