The AIX Error Logging Facility

Sandor W. Sklar

The primary goal of every UNIX systems administrator is to ensure that the systems that they are responsible for are functioning smoothly and with the best performance possible, 100% of the time. File systems running out of space, applications dumping core, and Ethernet adapter failures are just a sample of the types of things that can trip up a system, impacting that goal. Therefore, it is critical that the people responsible for a system are aware of anything that might have an impact on attaining that 100% system availability.

One of the things that makes AIX my favorite flavor of UNIX is that, besides all the standard tools, daemons, and configuration files that are present in all flavors of UNIX, IBM has provided a number of enhancements that make the monitoring, reliability, and administration of RS/6000 systems second to none. This article will focus on one of those tools: the error logging facility. I'll show you how the AIX error logging facility works, then I'll present a program I wrote that checks the log for error messages, filters out any error messages you wish to ignore, and sends an email to the systems administrator.

The Error Logging Subsystem

On most UNIX systems, information and errors from system events and processes are managed by the syslog daemon (syslogd); depending on settings in the configuration file /etc/syslog.conf, messages are passed from the operating system, daemons, and applications to the console, to log files, or to nowhere at all. AIX includes the syslog daemon, and it is used in the same way that other UNIX-based operating systems use it. In addition to syslog, though, AIX also contains another facility for the management of hardware, operating system, and application messages and errors.