24. Alert

The FreeNAS® alert system provides a visual warning of any conditions that require administrative attention. The Alert button in the far right corner flashes red when there is an outstanding alert. In the example alert shown in Figure 24.1, the system is warning that the S.M.A.R.T. service is not running.

_images/alert2a.png

Fig. 24.1 Example Alert Message

Informational messages have a green OK, warning messages flash yellow, and messages requiring attention are listed as a red CRITICAL. CRITICAL messages are also emailed to the root user account. To remove the flashing alert for a message, deselect the option next to it.

Behind the scenes, an alert daemon checks for various alert conditions, such as volume and disk status, and writes the current conditions to /var/tmp/alert. The daemon retrieves the current alert status every minute and changes the solid green alert icon to flashing red when a new alert is detected.

Current alerts are viewed from the Shell option of the Console Setup Menu (Figure 3.1) or from the Web Shell (Figure 18.1) by running alertcli.py.

Some of the conditions that trigger an alert include:

  • used space on a volume, 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 unchecked if a pool upgrade is not desired at present
  • a new update is available
  • the system reboots itself
  • non-optimal multipath states are detected
  • ZFS pool status changes from HEALTHY
  • a S.M.A.R.T. error occurs
  • the system dataset does not reside on the boot pool
  • syslog-ng(8) is not running
  • 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
  • a periodic snapshot or replication task fails
  • a VMware login or a VMware-Snapshot 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