You can use the SMF dump program (IFASMFDP) to create data sets containing certain record types and to also produce a summary activity report. You can use Tivoli® Decision Support for z/OS®, an IBM® program product, to process data sets that are produced by SMF. An installation may want to produce their own report. Producing a report usually requires at least two operations: sorting the SMF records and then writing them in an appropriate format.
For those installations that choose to read the SMF data sets directly (rather than using the dump program), note that the SMF data sets are preformatted with dummy records. A dummy record is shorter than any valid SMF record and is easily identified because it contains the characters SMFEOFMARK. The SMF dump program terminates processing when it encounters a dummy record, improving data set processing performance.