Agilent Technologies N1996A-503 User Reference page 323

Using The Status Monitoring
6
Subsystem
When you are programming the instrument you may need to monitor instrument status to
check for error conditions or monitor changes. You can determine the state of certain
instrument events/conditions by programming the status register system. IEEE common
commands (those beginning with *) access the higher-level summary registers. To access
the information from specific registers you would use the STATus commands.
The STATus subsystem remote commands set and query the status hardware registers.
This system of registers monitors various events and conditions in the instrument.
Software written to control the instrument may need to monitor some of these events and
conditions.
323