Warnings and Notifications

On console sign-in, a health report indicates the system status. This health report shows this data:

Last login: Tue Sep 3 10:19:07 2013 from 172.29.232.68
host: alan, role: standalone, load: 0.35, USERS: 3
date: 2013-09-03 10:20:02 +00:00, up: 2:05
network: 172.29.89.182, ntp: 172.29.1.15
SECURITY UPDATES: 136 security updates available
database: 8.0Gb
services: ok

The report values mean:

  • last console sign-in and IP address source

  • the load average of the system

  • the number of users currently signed in

  • the system uptime

  • the status of the system services

  • whether security updates are available

  • disk, CPU, and memory warnings if applicable

  • warnings are displayed in uppercase to draw attention

The report can be redisplayed by typing the command:

health

The system can be configured to forward warnings and notifications to various destinations, including:

  • local email

  • remote email addresses

  • remote SNMP destinations

Local email allows the administrator to view a list of warnings, and delete them as necessary.

The notification destinations can be displayed with notify list. The destinations for each event level can be set with notify add info|warn|error <destination-URI> Refer to the Network URI Specification topic for a detailed description of URIs. Note that email notifications require the mail relay to be set with notify emailrelay <relayhost>. The default from address is platform@<hostname>. A from outgoing address for the email relay can also be configured with notify emailfrom <from: email address> - see: Enable Health Monitoring. A test event can be generated with notify test info|warn|error to test the notification delivery mechanism.

Examples:

  • notify add info mailto:sysadmin@mycompany.com

  • notify add error snmp://public@mysnmpserver.com

$ notify add error snmp://[email protected]
   notifications:
     emailrelay: 172.1.1.1
     level:
         error:
             snmp://[email protected]
             mailto:platform@localhost
         info:
             mailto:platform@localhost
         warn:
             mailto:platform@localhost

In addition to external email and SNMP alerts, the system also records various events to a local mailbox. Refer to the Mail Command section for details.

SNMP CPU load notifications are set using:

snmp load <1min load> <5min load> <15min load>

This results in notifications being sent should the threshold be exceeded. For a server with 2 CPUs, it is recommended that this setting be:

snmp load 8 4 2

This means that notifications are sent if the 2-CPU system load averages over the last 1, 5, and 15 minutes reach these values.