Diagnostics Overview Guide

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Introduction
HP is committed to ensuring maximum operational uptime for the HP-UX operating
system. Because server hardware components can fail causing reduced server
performance or even server downtime, HP provides a suite of online and offline software-
based diagnostic utilities. You can use these utilities to validate, provide information
about, and monitor the status of common hardware components. These utilities reduce
server management efforts, enabling you to identify and target specific hardware-related
issues to quickly resolve problems. This document describes these diagnostic utilities.
Server Hardware Diagnostics Overview
A server is designed with modular hardware components; each component plays a role in
the total operation of the server. These components include power supply, processors
(CPU), memory, cooling devices, and peripheral devices.
HP provides two sets of software-based diagnostic utilities for identifying common
hardware components in a system and checking the status and property information about
those hardware components. The diagnostic utility that you use to perform these tasks
depends on whether or not the system is on line or off line:
• If the system is running HP-UX, use online diagnostic utilities.
• If the system does not boot or if it is inadvisable to boot the system, use offline
diagnostic utilities.
The following sections describe the online and offline diagnostic utilities.
Online Diagnostic Utilities
On a system running the HP-UX operating system software, online diagnostic utilities
enable you to perform the following operations:
• Check the status and property information of hardware components during regular
maintenance or because the system is not performing as expected under normal
circumstances.
• Automatically receive error messages about hardware components.
The following lists the online diagnostic utilities:
• System Fault Management (SFM).
• Online Diagnostics, which includes Event Monitoring Service (EMS) and Support
Tools Manager (STM). Although EMS and STM are different products and used
for different purposes, they are commonly used together and are presented as such
in this document.
This section describes the online diagnostic utilities.