20. Alert

The FreeNAS® alert system provides a visual warning of any conditions that require administrative attention. The Alert icon in the upper right corner has a notification badge that displays the total number of unread alerts. In the example alert shown in Figure 20.1, the system is warning that a pool is degraded.

_images/alert-example.png

Fig. 20.1 Example Alert Message

Table 20.1 shows the icons that indicate notification, warning, and critical alerts. Critical messages are also emailed to the root account.

Table 20.1 FreeNAS® Alert Icons
Alert Level Icon
Notification
Warning
Critical

Close an alert message by hovering over it until Click to Dismiss appears. There is also an option to CLEAR ALL ALERTS. Close all messages to remove any notification badge from the alerts icon.

Behind the scenes, an alert daemon checks for various alert conditions, such as pool and disk status, and writes the current conditions to the system RAM. These messages are flushed to the SQLite database periodically and then published to the user interface.

Current alerts are viewed from the Shell option of the Console Setup Menu (Figure 3.1) or the Web Shell (Figure 18.1) by running midclt call alert.list.

Notifications for specific alerts are adjusted in the Alert Settings menu. An alert message can be set to publish IMMEDIATELY, HOURLY, DAILY, or NEVER.

Some of the conditions that trigger an alert include:

  • used space on a pool, dataset, or zvol goes over 80%; the alert goes red at 95%
  • new ZFS Feature Flags are available for the pool; this alert can be adjusted in Alert Settings if a pool upgrade is not desired at present
  • a new update is available
  • ZFS pool status changes from HEALTHY
  • a S.M.A.R.T. error occurs
  • the system is unable to bind to the WebGUI IPv4 Address set in System ➞ General
  • the system can not find an IP address configured on an iSCSI portal
  • the NTP server cannot be contacted
  • syslog-ng(8) is not running
  • a replication task fails
  • a VMware login or a VMware-Snapshots task fails
  • deleting a VMware snapshot fails
  • a Certificate Authority or certificate is invalid or malformed
  • an update failed, or the system needs to reboot to complete a successful update
  • a re-key operation fails on an encrypted pool
  • LDAP failed to bind to the domain
  • any member interfaces of a lagg interface are not active
  • the status of an Avago MegaRAID SAS controller has changed; mfiutil(8) is included for managing these devices
  • a scrub is paused