Dale Ghent wrote:
> I was thinking this morning about SMF and realized that it lacks a
> feature to export alerts or service state changes outside of the
> system. Such a mechanism would be useful in order to alert a NMS that
> a service has gone offline, online, or is in maintenance.
Totally agreed. We've called this "Transitions", and while I put some
of the plumbing into svc.startd to make it easier a while ago, we
haven't managed to actually staff this work yet. Transitions would
allow you to select between an SNMP trap, email notification, or simple
execution of a shell script on a specified state transition.
(The only real tricky part is the configuration of messages. Some sites
may not want notification of all transitions for all services. An easy
an flexible way to describe the desired policy is important. The rest
is a fairly straightforward fault-tolerant coding exercise.)
>
> I may be wrong, but perhaps some integration with FMA might be in
> order here. I already use the FMA/SMA combo to send SNMP traps when an
> event that FMA knows about occurs, and this facility seems perfect for
> reporting a Fault that's emitted by SMF.
>
> Are there already plans to marry SMF and FMA in this way, and if not,
> would it be considered a good idea to do so?
FMA, I believe, only sends traps on a diagnosed fault. It didn't seem
appropriate to wedge SMF informative ("Hey, I'm online!") notifications
into that infrastructure. However, the intent was always to conform as
closely as possible to the MIB that FMA defined. (And reuse any code
possible as well, of course.)
There's also a larger project with a few phases to do software fault
diagnoses through FMA, but I don't think it directly applies to this
specific feature request.
liane
