Stand-alone dump

The stand-alone dump program (SADMP) produces a stand-alone dump of storage that is occupied by one of the following:

A system that failed.
A stand-alone dump program that failed.
Either the stand-alone dump program dumped itself — a self-dump —, or the operator loaded another stand-alone dump program to dump the failed stand-alone dump program.

The stand-alone dump program and the stand-alone dump together form what is known as the stand-alone dump service aid. The term stand-alone means that the dump is performed separately from normal system operations and does not require the system to be in a condition for normal operation.

The stand-alone dump program produces a high-speed, unformatted dump of all of central storage, plus it can include user tailorable parts of paged-out virtual storage. The user generated stand-alone dump program must reside on a storage device that can be used to IPL from.

Produce a stand-alone dump when the failure symptom is a wait state with a wait state code, a wait state with no processing, an instruction loop, or slow processing.

You create the stand-alone dump program that dumps the storage. Use the AMDSADMP macro to produce the following:

A stand-alone dump program that resides on DASD, with output directed to a tape volume or to a DASD dump data set
A stand-alone dump program that resides on tape, with output directed to a tape volume or to a DASD dump data set.

A stand-alone dump supplies information that is needed to determine why the system or the stand-alone dump program failed.

You can create different versions of the stand-alone dump program to dump different types and amounts of storage. To create the different versions, code several AMDSADMP macros by varying the values of keywords on the macros.

Before you begin, also consider reading the following topics:

For a set of best practices for optimizing stand-alone dump (SADMP) data capture, optimizing problem analysis time, and ensuring that the stand-alone dump is successful at capturing the necessary information for use by IBM® Support, see the topic about Best practices for large stand-alone dump in z/OS Problem Management.
To enable your operators and the system to respond appropriately to disabled wait states, consider activating the AutoIPL function, see the topic about Using the automatic IPL function in z/OS MVS Planning: Operations.