Managing Event Log Entries

This section describes events and their integral role in to monitoring your servers.

Events are generated when certain conditions related to attributes occur. Each event has an associated topic. For example, when a server is discovered by the management server, an event is generated with the topic Action.Physical.Discovered. For a complete list of event topics, see create notification in Sun N1 System Manager 1.3 Command Line Reference Manual.

Events can be monitored. Monitoring is connected with the broadcasting of events for each monitored server or group of servers. When a monitored attribute's value is beyond the default or user-defined threshold safe range, an event is generated and a status is issued.

• If monitoring is enabled for a server, provided a notification rule has been added for the event, the event causes a notification to be emitted from the management server for that event.

• If monitoring is disabled for a server, monitoring events are not generated for that server. You might want to disable monitoring of a hardware component to perform maintenance tasks without generating events.

See Introduction to Monitoring for more information about monitoring.

See Setting Up Event Notifications for more information about event notifications.

Lifecycle events continue to be generated even with monitoring disabled. Lifecycle events include server discovery, server change or deletion, or server group creation. If you have requested notification of this type of event, you can still receive notifications even with monitoring disabled.

Event logs are created when events occur. For example, if any monitored IP address is unreachable, an event is generated. This event creates an event log record, which is visible from the browser interface.

Servers that use ALOM do not send event notifications to the management server by use of traps. Instead, they send event notifications by email. To ensure that the management server collects data from these servers, the N1 System Manager management server has its own port 25 email server.

Event Log Overview

During the installation and configuration of the N1 System Manager, you can configure which events to log and you can also interactively configure severity levels for event topics. See Configuring the N1 System Manager in Sun N1 System Manager 1.3 Installation and Configuration Guide.

Even if a log is not saved, it can still generate an event notification.

Use the show log command to view the following information about events:

• Date – The date and time of the event.

• Subject – The server on which the event occurred.

• Topic – The topic of the event, which can be useful for setting up event notifications. Refer to Setting Up Event Notifications for information.

• Severity – Relative severity of the event.

• Level – Relative level of the event.

• Source – The name of the component that generated the event. For events that are generated during the execution of a job, the source is the job number.

• Role – Role or user name of the user who initiated the event.

• Message – Complete text of the event log message.

The n1smconfig script can be used to change the number of days for which event logs are kept. Reducing the number of days for which event logs are stored reduces the average size of the event log files. This task ensures that the event log file size does not impair performance. The n1smconfig script is stored at /usr/bin for both the Linux and Solaris OS platforms. This script can be used to set the number of days for which event logs are held. To configure event logging, specify an event category and a resource category. The following event categories are defined:

• Action

• Ereport

• Lifecycle

• List

• Problem

• Statistic

• all

Use the all event category to indicate that all events are to be logged. To understand how other event categories relate to actual events, see the event notification topics at create notification in Sun N1 System Manager 1.3 Command Line Reference Manual. General log files are saved to the syslog file at /var/adm/messages or /var/log/messages

To View the Event Log

Steps

1. Log in to the N1 System Manager.

   See To Access the N1 System Manager Command Line for details.

2. Type the following command:

   N1-ok> show log [count count]

   The Events log appears with events listed most recent first. The value for the count attribute is the number of events to show in the output. The default value for count is 500. See show log in Sun N1 System Manager 1.3 Command Line Reference Manual for details.

See Also

Event Log Overview

To Filter the Event Log

Steps

1. Log in to the N1 System Manager.

   See To Access the N1 System Manager Command Line for details.

2. Type the following command:

   N1-ok> show log [after after] [before before] [count count] [severity severity]

   The output shows only the events that match the specified criteria. The before or after variable values must be formatted appropriately, for example, 2005-07-20T11:53:04. The possible values for severity are as follows:

   • unknown

   • other

   • information

   • warning

   • minor

   • major

   • critical

   • fatal

   See show log in Sun N1 System Manager 1.3 Command Line Reference Manual for details.

To View Event Details

Steps

1. Log in to the N1 System Manager.

   See To Access the N1 System Manager Command Line for details.

2. Type the following command:

   N1-ok> show log log

   The details of the event appear in the output. The log variable is the log ID. See show log in Sun N1 System Manager 1.3 Command Line Reference Manual for details.

Example 6–18 Viewing Event Details

N1-ok> show log 72
ID:       72
Date:     2005-03-15T13:35:59-0700
Subject:  RemoteCmdPlan
Topic:    Action.Logical.JobStarted
Severity: Information
Level:    FINE
Source:   Job Service
Role:     root
Message:  RemoteCmdPlan job initiated by root: job ID = 15.