Alright, this post will be very much focused on how to debug issues and will be low level.

Murex does crash and number of times, working for Murex we did not get all the information we needed to pinpoint precisely the problem.

The system crashes… what to do?

The first thing is to gather information from the user encountering the crash and understand what was the user doing, if it happened regularly, etc… One important thing to check, if the crash is recent: was anything changed recently (change of configuration or setting for example).

The second step is to reproduce the crash on your side (hopefully without the user). If the crash is too random or cannot be reproduced at will, the best is then to gather the core files and share them with Murex to obtain more information as to what the session was doing at the time.

Assuming the crash can be reproduced, the next step is to narrow it down. This step will actually speed greatly the turnaround from Murex side on the problem. And it might also lead to a workaround to the crash. Depending as to where the crash is happening, there could be multiple way of proceeding. I’ll cover the most common case: crash happening while loading multiple transactions.

If you’re lucky, the transaction scan watching might give you the answer. Transaction scan watching basically logs in when a transaction is opened for valuation and then logs it out. So each transaction should appear an even number of times. If one does appear an odd amount of time (and it’s the last one on the list) you might then have a winner. To confirm that the transaction is indeed the culprit, just try your process (accounting entries generation, simulation) on that single trade and see if the crash occurs.

To use transaction scan watching, go to help-monitor, SPB Information and choose transaction scan watching (Zap). This will delete the existing log (transaction scan watching is only used for debugging, you do not endanger anything by zapping it out, except of course if someone else is doing debugging at the same time!). Then choose activate and run your process again. Once it crashes, with a new session choose Transaction scan watching (Display) to check the log.

If the transaction scan watching fails to focus on a single trade, it will give you trades which have already been processed and might also give you a trend: all IRS have passed, it failed while doing loans. Be careful with this info as the way of scanning transactions is not always clear.
Without the transaction scan watching, to narrow it down, you then need to break it down by portfolios or deal type (usually the knowledge of what was changed recently helps as you can focus on what you suspect being wrong first). Don’t hesitate to use filters on trades inserted today or which had events performed on them during the day.

Once you have the trade, check it out (check also the static data and market data it uses) to understand where is the issue coming from. If you can fix it, it’s a win .
If you can’t, you can then test that the issue occurs with a new trade for which you picked the same pattern. And in that case, congrats you’ve found the bug and can raise it as such.