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The SGI Embedded Support Partner is an infrastructure that is integrated into the operating system for the purposes of support. This infrastructure contains various components that perform the following:
  • Capture and store system level events
  • Capture and store system configuration
  • Capture and store system availability information
  • Provide features of proactive notification
  • Generate various reports for supportability
The Embedded Support Partner consists of a set of daemons that perform various monitoring activities. These include an event monitoring daemon(eventmond) and database daemon(espdbd). The Embedded Support Partner can be pre-programmed for event monitoring and provides flexible throttling features for the events. Actions can also be programmed for each event.

Events sources include kernel, performance monitoring tools, availability tools, configuration monitoring tools and user applications. Events are categorized into classes and types. A class can have many types. Example of a class could be SCSI and the various types under this class could be SCSI hard error, SCSI Bus reset, etc. The event types are uniquely sequenced and pre-assigned. The events propagate to the Embeedded Support Partner through syslogd and captured by the eventmond. The message string contains the unique sequence number with a special tag which eventmond identifies. The tag and sequence number also show up in SYSLOG. An example of the message in SYSLOG is:

May 24 23:16:34 6D:starwars esphttpd[5722]: |$(0x200120)started
User defined events can be added using the Embedded Support Partner user interface. The sequence numbers are automatically generated. User applications can log user defined events into the Embedded Support Partner framework by two mechanisms. Applications can include the EventMonAPI(3X) calls within or could use the command line driven application esplogger(1M). Both methods would need to use the unique sequence number generated by the Embedded Support Partner user interface.

Each event can have assoicated actions that can be proactively triggered by the Embedded Support Partner in reaction to an event. Actions can be pre-programmed and assigned to events. Examples of actions include: Graphical posts onto the console, email, chatty paging and numeric paging. Most of the notification features are incorporated using espnotify(1) utility. Numeric paging needs the use of modems and uses QuickPage(1M) software. The option of numeric paging must be chkconfig(1M) on for use.

The Embedded Support Partner also provides the facility to manage multiple systems in a group environment. Under this environment, one of the systems can be designated as the Group Manager. The Group Manager can then subscribe to various events from the member systems. The member systems forward the occurance and assoicated data of the subscribed events to the Group Manager for which proactive actions can be set to be taken. Certain class of events have to be subscribed in full. Examples of this are Availability, Configuration, etc. The Group Manager also provides the capability to monitor various services on the member systems. These include: icmp, rpcbind, dns, smtp, nntp, etc. The services can be configured using the Embedded Support Partner user interface and requires that pcp_eoe subsystem be installed. The Group Manager capabilities are licensed.

The Embedded Support Partner supports a html browser based interface and for non-graphics systems, a Lynx based ASCII interface. The ASCII interface supports single systems only. The browser interface supports both single systems and multiple systems (Group Management) environment. At the time of logging in, one must choose the type from the user interface. The interfaces runs from a http based server that is started by inetd on connection only.

The Embedded Support Partner supports a variety of reports. These include: hardware and software reports, event reports, actions reports and availability reports. The Embedded Support Partner user interface, by default, is accessable by localhost only. The user interface can be started by the launchESPartner(1) or by clicking the icon for Embedded Support Partner in the icon catalog under the support tools page. The Embedded Support Partner could then be customized according to the needs at the site. An online help facility is also provided for reference.