Status Message Characteristics
Status messages have several characteristics that help you identify the types of activities occurring at your sites.
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Message Severity
Message Type
Message Date and Time
Message Severity
Every status message is stamped with a severity that indicates the gravity of the information presented in the message.
Error messages Error messages are exceptional messages that occur when there are problems that require immediate administrator attention. Typically, an error message means that a component cannot recover from or work around a problem. As a result, one or more SMS features are nonfunctional until the administrator corrects the problem. Examples of the types of problems error messages indicate are:
A server is down.
A disk or database is full.
Security problems have occurred.
Critical files or data are corrupt or missing.
An attempt to retry an operation has failed enough times that it is no longer a temporary problem.
Warning messages Warning messages are generated when potential problems occur that might require administrator attention. Typically, the component can work around these problems. Warning messages might indicate:
A disk or database is low on storage space.
A non-critical file, such as a Management Information Format (MIF) file or discovery data record (DDR) from a client, has been corrupted.
An operation is taking an unusually long time to be completed.
The administrator has configured the system in a dangerous or inappropriate way.
An operation failed, but due to other considerations, the failure should be temporary, and the component retries the operation later.
Informational messages Informational messages are usually flow-of-activity messages that illustrate the activities of a component during normal, successful operation. Informational messages might also indicate problems if the problems are relatively unimportant. For example, if a component fails to connect to a computer by using one account, but there are three other accounts it can try, the failure is reported as an informational message. If all of the accounts fail, the component might report a warning or an error message.
Message Type
Every status message is stamped with one of three possible types.
Milestone When SMS components complete complex operations, milestone messages indicate successful or unsuccessful completion. If the operation is successful, the milestone message is informational. If the operation is unsuccessful, the milestone message is either a warning or an error message.
Detail The context of status messages representing a complex operation.
Audit Audit status messages provide an audit trail of actions that you take in the SMS Administrator console that result in objects being added, modified, or deleted. All audit messages are informational messages.
Message Date and Time
Knowing how date and time are displayed with status messages helps you to monitor and troubleshoot specific tasks that you schedule by using the SMS Administrator console. SMS stamps every status message with the system date and time that the message is reported, down to millisecond resolution. When you install SMS, the time zone in the Status Message viewer is set to the same time zone as your SMS site server.
You can configure the Status Message Viewer to display time in either local time (the time the event occurred in the time zone it occurred) or Coordinated Universal Time (UTC, formerly Greenwich Mean Time). You can use UTC to debug problems in an SMS hierarchy that has multiple sites in different time zones. When you use UTC, if you send a package from the New York site, you can view the messages in the Status Message Viewer to see when the package left the New York site and when it arrived in Los Angeles. It is easier to determine how events happen relative to one another when they are both reported in UTC.
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