Handling Threshold Breaches

If a threshold value is breached for a monitored attribute, an event is generated. You can create notification rules to warn you about this type of event. Notification of threshold breaches or warnings is done through the event log. This log is most easily viewed through the browser interface.

Notifications can be created using the create notification command and the resulting notification sent by email or to a pager. See create notification in Sun N1 System Manager 1.2 Command Line Reference Manual for syntax details.

Identifying Hardware and OS Threshold Breaches

If the value of a monitored hardware health attribute, or OS resource utilization attribute breaches a threshold value, an event log is immediately created, which indicates that the threshold has been breached. The event log is available from the browser interface. A symbol appears among the monitored data table in the browser interface to indicate that a threshold has been breached, as shows in the graphic at To Retrieve Threshold Values for a Server

Alternatively, use the show log command to verify that the event log has been generated:

N1-ok> show log
Id            Date                       Severity    Subject     Message
.
. 
10            2005-11-22T01:45:02-0800   WARNING     Sun_V20z_XG041105786
A critical high threshold was violated for server Sun_V20z_XG041105786: Attribute cpu0.vtt-s3 Value 1.32

13            2005-11-22T01:50:08-0800   WARNING     Sun_V20z_XG041105786
A normal low  threshold was violated for server Sun_V20z_XG041105786: Attribute cpu0.vtt-s3 Value 1.2

If monitoring traps are lost, a particular threshold status may not be refreshed for up to 30 hours, although the overall status can still be refreshed every 10 minutes.

Identifying Monitoring Failure

If monitoring is enabled, as described in Enabling and Disabling Monitoring, and the status in the output of the show server or show group commands is unknown or unreachable, then the server or server group is not being reached successfully for monitoring. If the status remains unknown or unreachable for less than 30 minutes, it is possible that a transient network problem is occurring. However if the status remains unknown or unreachable for more than 10 minutes, it is possible that monitoring has failed. This could be the result of a failure in the monitoring feature. For more information, see Resolving Command Failures Related to OS Monitoring.

If monitoring traps are lost, a particular threshold status may not be refreshed for up to 30 hours, although the overall status should still be refreshed every 10 minutes.

A time stamp is provided in the monitoring data output. The relationship between this time stamp and the current time can also be used to judge if there is an error with the monitoring agent.