Patent ID: 8775872

Claim:
A method for retaining diagnostic information for data in a computing storage environment by a processor device, comprising: initializing a diagnostic component, apart from a volume table of contents (VTOC), that is associated with an integrated catalog facility (ICF) catalog and with a base data set from a plurality of data sets via a catalog association record, wherein the diagnostic component is configured to retain base data set-specific diagnostic information retrievable by the computing storage environment to assist in error diagnosis and the ICF catalog is one of the plurality of data sets storing a plurality of information about the plurality of data sets for facilitating a retrieval of a name of the base data set and assists with retaining and retrieval of the base data set-specific diagnostic information; and storing the base data set-specific diagnostic information pursuant to at least one event associated with the base data set, wherein storing the base data set-specific diagnostic information pursuant to the at least one event associated with the base data set includes performing each of: tracking a number of times the base data set is opened for output, and logging at least one of a job, system, time of open, time of close, and a high used relative byte address at a time of closure.