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Monitoring the health of your system

Health monitors monitor certain critical conditions in your cluster and raise alerts if they detect a fault or risk. If there are active alerts, the system health status reports a degraded status for the cluster. The alerts include the information that you need to respond to degraded system health.

If the status is degraded, you can view details about the problem, including the probable cause and recommended recovery actions. After you resolve the problem, the system health status automatically returns to OK.

The system health status reflects multiple separate health monitors. A degraded status in an individual health monitor causes a degraded status for the overall system health.

For details on how ONTAP supports cluster switches for system health monitoring in your cluster, you can refer to the Lenovo Press.

Supported switches in Lenovo Press

  • How health monitoring works
    Individual health monitors have a set of policies that trigger alerts when certain conditions occur. Understanding how health monitoring works can help you respond to problems and control future alerts.
  • Available cluster health monitors
    There are several health monitors that monitor different parts of a cluster. Health monitors help you to recover from errors within ONTAP systems by detecting events, sending alerts to you, and deleting events as they clear.
  • Receiving system health alerts automatically
    You can manually view system health alerts by using the system health alert show command. However, you should subscribe to specific Event Management System (EMS) messages to automatically receive notifications when a health monitor generates an alert.
  • Responding to degraded system health
    When your system's health status is degraded, you can show alerts, read about the probable cause and corrective actions, show information about the degraded subsystem, and resolve the problem. Suppressed alerts are also shown so that you can modify them and see whether they have been acknowledged.
  • Configuring discovery of cluster and management network switches
    The cluster switch health monitor automatically attempts to discover your cluster and management network switches using the Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP) or LLDP. You must configure the health monitor if it cannot automatically discover a switch or if you do not want to use CDP for automatic discovery.
  • Verifying the monitoring of cluster and management network switches
    The cluster switch health monitor automatically attempts to monitor the switches that it discovers; however, monitoring might not happen automatically if the switches are not configured correctly. You should verify that the health monitor is properly configured to monitor your switches.
  • Commands for monitoring the health of your system
    You can use the system health commands to display information about the health of system resources, to respond to alerts, and to configure future alerts. Using the CLI commands enables you to view in-depth information about how health monitoring is configured. The man pages for the commands contain more information.