Event Window

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This window displays all events and polling results since the program began. Each event is color-coded according to the general type of error/warning.



Three types of messages are reported, relating to the type of information that was read from the peripherals:

·

Alerts generated from sense code information. This is what your peripheral returns when the drive is polled. In the example above, the IBM drive was in the process of spinning up when it was polled. We caused this result by just recycling power on the disk (which was mounted in an external cabinet) then polling it. Our database has thousands of error messages for the drives in our database, and the sense code information can provide a wealth of information if there is a problem. All of these events are saved in the ASCII file, HISTORY.TXT.

·	Statistical thresholds generated from log page information. The run-time options allow you to set the filename, which by default is STATUSHISTORY.TXT.

·	Enclosure alerts, provided your devices are mounted in a SES-compliant enclosure, and enclosure status polling is enabled.

You can see the text messages that your peripheral is capable of sending by selecting the View Sense Code Tables by Drive or View Log Page Tables by Drive. Both of these links provide more details on this functionality.

The four columns contain:

·	Date and Time: In MM/DD/CCYY format. Hours are in 24-hour format.

·	Physical: Formatted as Adapter#.ID,LUN (i.e., adapter #2, SCSI ID=4, LUN=0 displays as 2/4.0) then manufacturer and device model.

·	Message: The alphanumeric message defined by the manufacturer for the message, based on the Sense Key/Code/Qualifier combination. If the message is the result of a log page inquiry, then this field will contain N/A.

·	Key/Code/Qualifier: These are the sense keys, and what your SCSI peripheral vendor's technical person will want to know if you have a problem.

Usage:
If you click on any column header, then all messages will be sorted in ascending order by that column. In addition, the columns are resizeable by clicking on borders and dragging to the left or right.

Tip:
If your device is acting flaky, you might want to poll it every few seconds. This will impact performance slightly. Each poll consists of several SCSI commands including a read from block #0. Once errors are trapped, you can send your support person a copy of the HISTORY.TXT file for analysis and recommendations. You should also consider adding statistical polling which can examine device-specific parameters such as read errors, retries, and even temperature. Note that statistical polling only works with SCSI, fibre channel, and SSA disk drives. This is because IDE drives don't have this capability.

You should also consider configuring statistical logging such as trapping the number of buffer overruns, and retries.

Performance Tip:
Most drives can give you a wealth of information regarding seek sizes, and cache hits. By enabling statistical logging and defining relevant statistical alerts for all cache and seek-related information, then you can tune your file system and disk drive to maximize cache hits and minimize seek distances.