InSight Dump Formatter Overview

 

The InSight controller agent monitors the controller’s disk for new terminal dump files.  Once the controller agent detects a new terminal dump has occurred, the controller agent will wait for the IBM terminal dump formatter to complete.  The controller agent will then execute the InSight dump formatter tool.

 

The InSight Dump Formatter extracts useful InSight-related information from terminal dump files (adx_sdt1:adxcsltf.dat).  The formatter outputs a text file named adx_sdt1: adxcsltf.out.

 

Once the InSight dump formatter is complete, the controller agent archives the IBM terminal dump formatted output files, and the InSight terminal dump formatted output file (adxcsltf.out).  Also, the actual binary terminal dump file may be included in the archived zip file.  By default the binary terminal dump file is not included.  To include the binary terminal dump file, set the cdi parm cagentArchiveTerminalDump=”Y’.  Archiving the binary terminal dump file may require significant disk space.  Please attempt this in your lab to determine the disk requirements of archiving the binary terminal dump file.

 

The archived zip files containing the terminal dump file and formatted dump output files are located in the \qsa\dmpt directory.  By default, five zip files are maintained.  Therefore, data is archived for the five most recent terminal dumps.  The archived dump data files are named tdumprpt.001 thru tdumprpt.005.  The tdumprpt.001 contains the most recent terminal dump data.

 

Included in the formatter output is the following information which is tracked, in-memory, by the InSight terminal agent:

 

• Terminal stateinformation
• Globaland device history queues.

 

 

The sample below is a section of the Keyboard Device Event Queue.  This section shows that the “Signon” key was pressed followed by a “1” and then an “Enter”.  The terminal then beeped for 1 second, followed by another “Enter” key and so on.  The Keyboard Device Event Queueis a chronological event queue of events originating from the keyboard.  For a complete chronological list of events from all devices see the Global Event Queue.