Table Of Contents

Events and Event Logging

About Severity Levels

Message Format

Events and Event Logging

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This chapter describes events, event severity levels, and the event message format.

About Severity Levels

Messages originate from the switch in response to events that occur in the fabric. Events are classified by the following severity levels:

•Alarm - The alarm level describes events that are disruptive to the administration or operation of a fabric and require administrator intervention. Alarms are always logged and always displayed on the screen. Alarm thresholds can be defined for certain port errors to customize alarms.

•Critical - The critical level describes events that are generally disruptive to the administration or operation of the fabric, but require no action.

•Warning - The warning level describes events that are generally not disruptive to the administration or operation of the fabric, but are more important than the informative level events.

•Informative - The informative level describes routine events associated with a normal fabric.

Message Format

All messages have the same general format. However alarm messages differ slightly from critical, warning, and informative messages. Alarm messages have the following format:

[ordinal][timestamp][alarm_ID][message_text]

Critical, warning, and informative messages have the following format:

[ordinal][timestamp][severity][message_ID][source][message_text]

Table 1-1 describes the elements of both formats.

Table 1-1 Message Format Elements

Element	Format
[ordinal]	A number assigned to each message in sequence since the log history was cleared.
[timestamp]	The time the event occurred in the format day-month-hh:mm:ss:ms-yyyy. This time stamp comes from the switch for events that originate with the switch.
[alarm_ID]	The alarm ID combines the severity (A for alarm) and a message ID that identifies the message. The alarm_ID has the following format: [Acccc.nnnn] where A (alarm) is the severity, cccc is the message category number, and nnnn is the message number.
[severity]	The event severity: [C]-Critical, [W]-Warning, [I]-Informative.
[message_ID]	A number that identifies the message using the following format: [cccc.nnnn] where cccc is the message category number and nnnn is the message number.
[source]	The program module or application that generated the event. Sources include Zoning, Switch, PortApp, EPort, and Management Server.
[message_text]	The message text.