System Troubleshooting and Diagnostics
5.2 Product Fault Management and Symptom-Directed Diagnosis
VAX 4000 systems use Symptom-Directed Diagnosis tools primarily for
notification. The VAX System Integrity Monitor Plus (VAXsimPLUS)
interactive reporting tool triggers notification for high-level events recorded in
SYSTAT and LOGGING REASON.
The VAXsimPLUS monitor simply parses for a handful of SYSTAT flags
and LOGGING reason codes. The VAXsimPLUS monitor display is updated
and triggering occurs if the threshold has been reached. Some flags have
a threshold of one; for example, SYSTAT <08> ERROR THRESHOLD
EXCEEDED will trigger VAXsimPLUS upon the first occurrence, since at
least three errors would have already occurred and been handled by the
OpenVMS operating system.
All lower level errors will ultimately set one of the conditions shown in
Table 5–4. VAXsimPLUS will examine the conditions within a 24-hour
period—thresholds are typically one or two flags or logging reason codes within
that period.
Table 5–4 lists the conditions that will trigger VAXsimPLUS notification and
updating. Figure 5–8 shows the flow for the VAXsimPLUS monitor trigger (for
decision blocks with only one branch, the alternative is treated as an ignore
condition). An OpenVMS entry typy (as shown in Table 5–3) starts the trigger
flow for the VAXsimPLUS monitor. The entries ultimately are classified as
either hard or soft. Errors that require corrective maintenance are classified as
hard; while errors potentially requiring corrective maintenance are classified
as soft.
System Troubleshooting and Diagnostics 5–33
