Monitoring The System - Sun Microsystems Sun Fire V440 Diagnostics And Troubleshooting Manual

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C H A P T E R

Monitoring the System

When something goes wrong with the system, diagnostic tools can help you figure
out what caused the problem. Indeed, this is the principal use of most diagnostic
tools. However, this approach is inherently reactive. It means waiting until a
component fails outright.
Some diagnostic tools allow you to be more proactive by monitoring the system
while it is still "healthy." Monitoring tools give administrators early warning of
imminent failure, thereby allowing planned maintenance and better system
availability. Remote monitoring also allows administrators the convenience of
checking on the status of many machines from one centralized location.
Sun provides two tools that you can use to monitor servers:
Sun Management Center
Sun Advanced Lights Out Manager (ALOM)
In addition to these tools, Sun provides software-based and firmware-based
commands that display various kinds of system information. While not strictly a
monitoring tool, these commands enable you to review at a glance the status of
different system aspects and components.
This chapter describes the tasks necessary to use these tools to monitor your Sun
Fire V440 server.
Tasks covered in this chapter include:
"How to Monitor the System Using Sun Management Center" on page 74
"How to Monitor the System Using Sun Advanced Lights Out Manager" on
page 79
"How to Use Solaris System Information Commands" on page 93
"How to Use OpenBoot Information Commands" on page 94
If you want background information about the tools, turn to Chapter 2.
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