Message severity tags

GPFS™ has adopted a message severity tagging convention. This convention applies to some newer messages and to some messages that are being updated and adapted to be more usable by scripts or semi-automated management programs.

A severity tag is a one-character alphabetic code (A through Z), optionally followed by a colon (:) and a number, and surrounded by an opening and closing bracket ([ ]). For example:

[E] or [E:nnn]

If more than one substring within a message matches this pattern (for example, [A] or [A:nnn]), the severity tag is the first such matching string.

When the severity tag includes a numeric code (nnn), this is an error code associated with the message. If this were the only problem encountered by the command, the command return code would be nnn.

If a message does not have a severity tag, the message does not conform to this specification. You can determine the message severity by examining the text or any supplemental information provided in the message catalog, or by contacting the IBM® Support Center.

Each message severity tag has an assigned priority that can be used to filter the messages that are sent to the error log on Linux. Filtering is controlled with the mmchconfig attribute systemLogLevel. The default for systemLogLevel is error, which means GPFS will send all error [E], critical [X], and alert [A] messages to the error log. The values allowed for systemLogLevel are: alert, critical, error, warning, notice, configuration, informational, detail, or debug. Additionally, the value none can be specified so no messages are sent to the error log.

Alert [A] messages have the highest priority, and debug [B] messages have the lowest priority. If the systemLogLevel default of error is changed, only messages with the specified severity and all those with a higher priority are sent to the error log. The following table lists the message severity tags in order of priority:

Table 1. Message severity tags ordered by priority
Severity tag	Type of message (systemLogLevel attribute)	Meaning
A	alert	Indicates a problem where action must be taken immediately. Notify the appropriate person to correct the problem.
X	critical	Indicates a critical condition that should be corrected immediately. The system discovered an internal inconsistency of some kind. Command execution might be halted or the system might attempt to continue despite the inconsistency. Report these errors to the IBM Support Center.
E	error	Indicates an error condition. Command execution might or might not continue, but this error was likely caused by a persistent condition and will remain until corrected by some other program or administrative action. For example, a command operating on a single file or other GPFS object might terminate upon encountering any condition of severity E. As another example, a command operating on a list of files, finding that one of the files has permission bits set that disallow the operation, might continue to operate on all other files within the specified list of files.
W	warning	Indicates a problem, but command execution continues. The problem can be a transient inconsistency. It can be that the command has skipped some operations on some objects, or is reporting an irregularity that could be of interest. For example, if a multipass command operating on many files discovers during its second pass that a file that was present during the first pass is no longer present, the file might have been removed by another command or program.
N	notice	Indicates a normal but significant condition. These events are unusual but not error conditions, and might be summarized in an email to developers or administrators for spotting potential problems. No immediate action is required.
C	configuration	Indicates a configuration change; such as, creating a file system or removing a node from the cluster.
I	informational	Indicates normal operation. This message by itself indicates that nothing is wrong; no action is required.
D	detail	Indicates verbose operational messages; no is action required.
B	debug	Indicates debug-level messages that are useful to application developers for debugging purposes. This information is not useful during operations.