Spinning off your JES Log data

If you have z/OS queue managers that are up and running for a long time between recycles or system IPL's...you have probably seen the JES spool usage for these tasks grow quite large, especially if you have SVRCONN client connections connecting and disconnecting at a high rate.

Well....there is a way to have your JES spin off at predetermined intervals....and it is really quite easy. Now this is not just for WebSphere MQ started tasks.....this can be used for IMS, CICS, DB2....or virtually any started task that ends up producing a lot of JES messages and using up spool space.

Step one will be to ensure that the dataset that includes the queue manager and channel initiator JCL is included in the MASTER JCL IEFPDSI concatenation. This can be found in the 'SYS1.PARMLIB' member MSTJCLxx.  If a change to this member needs to be made...an IPL will be required. It might be easier to place queue manager and chinit JCL in a dataset already in the concatenation.

Once you have these PROC's in a MASTER JCL library, you will need to edit them to add some entries to allow the spin off. The spin off can be set by a number of lines, or set to spin at a specific time.

We will be changing the PROC statement to a JOB statement. Make sure your MSGCLASS is one that goes to a JHS...or other storage software so you will have the JES for possible troubleshooting or historical purposes.

Before:

//MQ1AMSTR PROC

After:

//MQ1AMSTR JOB JESLOG=(SPIN,1K),MSGCLASS=U,MSGLEVEL=1

If you are using any JCL variables in your PROC....these will need to done by a SET= command when changing to the JOB format.

Now, for the SPIN options.....you can have the following formats:

 JESLOG=(SPIN,15:00)  - SPIN off at 3:00 PM every day
 JESLOG=(SPIN,4000)   - SPIN off every 4000 lines of output
 JESLOG=(SPIN,2K)      - SPIN off every 2000 lines of output

You can decide based on your organizations needs...what the appropriate number would be for line count....or maybe just spin every day at midnight.

I hope this helps some of you that have long running queue managers that eat up a lot of spool space.

Have fun!!!