Displaying the status of services and processes (nco_pa_status)

You can run the nco_pa_status utility to retrieve the status of services in the process control system configuration. For each service, the nco_pa_status utility returns a list of defined processes, the status of each process, and the process identifier.

To display the service status, enter the following command:

$NCHOME/omnibus/bin/nco_pa_status -server string

In this command, string is the process agent name. You can optionally run the command with additional command-line options.

Example output is as follows:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Service Name	Process Name	Hostname	User	Status	PID
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Master Service	ObjectServer	SFOSYS1		root	RUNNING	16751
			Proxy	SFOSYS1		root	RUNNING	16752
			Sleep	SFOSYS1		root	RUNNING	16753
			Probe	SFOSYS1		root	RUNNING	16754
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

The PID value for managed processes is the UNIX process identifier, or the PID as shown in the Windows Task Manager.

The following table describes each of the status levels.

Table 1. Service status descriptions
Status level	Description
RUNNING	The process is running.
STARTING	A start request has been issued.
PENDING	The process is waiting for a time dependency to complete. This status can also indicate that the process has failed to start properly (regardless of any process dependencies).
WAITING	The process is waiting for a dependency to start.
DEAD	The process is not running.
ERROR	It was not possible to retrieve a status from the process agent.

If a process agent is instructed to run a process by a process agent running on a separate machine, the remote process agent does not retain a record of the process. If the remote process agent stops, the process continues to run. When the remote process agent restarts, it has no record of the process, and therefore the process status for this orphan process is listed as DEAD. You can manually restart the process by using the nco_pa_start utility.

If a process is defined as unmanaged (Managed = False) in the process agent configuration file (nco_pa.conf), nco_pa_status can return a random status when it checks the process. For example, the returned status might be DEAD when the process is running correctly. This is not an error and it happens because the process agent starts unmanaged processes but does not monitor them.

Command-line options for nco_pa_status

Command-line options for the nco_pa_status utility are described in the following table.

Table 2. Command-line options for nco_pa_status
Command-line option	Description
-help	Displays help on the command-line options and exits.
-nosecure	Connects to process agents in a non-secure mode that does not encrypt login information during transmission.
-password `string`	The password to use for the process agent.
-server `string`	Name of process agent to contact.
-user `string`	The user name for the process agent. The default is the user running the command.
-version	Displays software version information and exits.