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OpenSolaris Project: Sensor Abstraction Layer

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Fault Management

Introduction

The Project

This project proposes extensions to the fault management architecture (FMA) to support a sensor abstraction layer for the collection and analysis of sensor based telemetry that can be used in fault and resource management.

The Problem

How do we manage raw telemetry data kept, maintained and exported by disparate sources for the purposes of fault, resource management and budgeting? Today, there are a number of sensor collection mechanisms exported by the hardware and software. For the most part, the information they export is hap-haphazardly presented and accessed according to ad-hoc operating system interfaces, per-platform methods or per-subsystem industry standards (SMBus, SMART and IPMI). Using this data for fault or resource management is clumsy and typically requires low-level system knowledge baked into higher-level management applications.

Key Objectives

As part of an overall sensor abstraction layer based on our current fault management architecture, we can solve this problem and provide a better understanding of the overall health and usage of a system through more sophisticated diagnosis technologies and fine-grained observability of sensor data via common access methods. A sensor abstraction layer must posses:


    1. the ability to alert the administrator to conditions observed by platform sensors that may impact the operational state of the platform.

    2. the ability to alert the administrator to conditions that resolve themselves as observed by platform sensors.

    3. the ability to watch one or more sensors and correlate the data for predictive fault analysis or resource management.

    4. the ability to continuously record sensor data and retrieve it from systems for offline analysis, future system design or development of more advanced diagnosis algorithms.

    5. the ability for administrators and service personnel to manually inspect sensor values without having to understand the exact implementation (e.g. IPMI or SMBus).

    6. the ability to connect sensor data to higher-level diagnosis (e.g. SMART disk data to SCSI and ZFS diagnosis engines).

    7. the ability to understand and observe performance and power budgets based on raw sensor data.










Documents

Announcements

03 May 2007 Opening Day

Blogs

cindi - A Visual Look at Fishworks

Dec 2, 12:03 PM

So what does a project like Fishworks look like?  I put together a visual representation of the Fishworks project using Code Swarm that has been captured in a video . The video shows how the ...

eschrock - ZFS, FMA, hotplug, and Fishworks

Nov 20, 11:14 PM

In the past, I've discussed the evolution of disk FMA . Much has been accomplished in the past year, but there are still several gaps when it comes to ZFS and disk faults. In Solaris today, a fault ...

eschrock - Fishworks Storage Configuration

Nov 12, 11:25 AM

Since our initial product was going to be a NAS appliance, we knew early on that storage configuration would be a critical part of the initial Fishworks experience. Thanks to the power of ZFS storage ...

eschrock - So how much work was it?

Nov 11, 9:29 AM

With any product, there is always some talk from the enthusiasts about how they could do it faster, cheaper, or simpler. Inevitably, there's a little bit of truth to both sides. Enthusiasts have been ...

eschrock - Fishworks Hardware Topology

Nov 10, 7:05 AM

It's hard to believe that this day has finally come. After more than two and a half years, our first Fishworks-based product has been released. You can keep up to date with the latest info at the ...

cindi - Fishworks: A Brief Introduction

Nov 10, 6:06 AM

Fishworks is the name of a team of engineers at Sun Microsystems.  The FISH in Fishworks is an acronym for Fully Integrated Software and Hardware and is the underlying software that unites operating ...

eschrock - SES Sensors and Indicators

Aug 7, 8:32 AM

Last week, Rob Johnston and I coordinated two putbacks to Solaris to further the cause of Solaris platform integration, this time focusing on sensors and indicators. Rob has a great blog post with an ...

robj - A Sensor Abstraction Layer for FMA

Aug 6, 2:42 PM

Solaris Nevada build 96 is an important milestone build for the Sensor Abstraction Layer project for FMA, as it introduces the software infrastructure (the plumbing) on which the functionality ...

eschrock - External storage enclosures in Solaris

Jul 13, 9:23 PM

Over the past few years, I've been working on various parts of Solaris platform integration , with an emphasis on disk monitoring . While the majority of my time has been focused on fishworks, I have ...

robj - FMA and DIMM serial numbers

Apr 17, 7:20 PM

I've pretty much had my head down working on various FMA bug fixes and enhancements for the last few months.  Now that I've finally gotten them putback, I have some time to take a (short) breather ...