EMS Manual

Reporting Events
EMS Manual—426909-005
8-6
What Is Provided for You

Event messages are almost always filtered before reaching an interested party, so
ensure that the information is presented in a way that allows many filtering options.
Some examples of filtering considerations:

It is more convenient to filter on a token at the top level than on a token within
a list. Present any information that a user might want to include in the filtering
criteria as a token at the top level, as opposed to packaging it inside a list.

If you think a user might want to retrieve a particular class of event messages
(for example, all protocol errors of a certain type), consider defining a token to
identify the message class to make it easier for the user to write a filter to
extract a particular class of messages.

It is more difficult for the filter programmer to extract information presented as
an array of generic tokens than as a set of unique tokens. Avoid using arrays
of tokens unless they contain values to which the same semantics apply. For
example, if the message contains a starting time and an ending time, define
two tokens (such as TKN-START-TIME and TKN-END-TIME) rather than using
the same token (such as TKN-TIME) twice.
In general, make things as easy as possible for the recipients of event messages. A
particular event-message type is implemented only once but is filtered, retrieved, and
displayed many times.
What Is Provided for You
This information in the event message is always automatically provided by EMS:

The length of the final event message (ZSPI-TKN-USEDLEN)

The maximum version of fields in structures (ZSPI-TKN-MAX-FIELD-VERSION)

The time at which the event was generated (ZEMS-TKN-GENTIME) if you do not
specify a time

The node, processor number, PIN, process descriptor, and user ID of the reporting
process (ZEMS-TKN-NODENUM, ZEMS-TKN-CPU, ZEMS-TKN-PIN, ZEMS-TKN-
PROC-DESC, ZEMS-TKN-USERID)
The EMS collector that receives the event message provides the time at which the
message was written to the collector’s log file (ZEMS-TKN-LOGTIME).
What You Must Provide
Some tokens are required for all EMS messages, and some are required only for
certain kinds of messages. For a detailed description of required tokens, see
Section 14, EMS Definitions.