System 800xA is a distributed system. The availability of the system depends on the availability of the distributed function and the redundancy applied. Addition of execution capacity to System 800xA is mainly done by adding servers. To maintain the availability in a distributed subsystem, the components must be supervised.
The suppliers of servers have improved the supervision functionality of their products to make fault tracing easier and to inform the users as early as possible, in order to avoid that smaller problems develop into major disturbances in the system. In many systems, fans, power supplies and disks are redundant. It is therefore important that alarms are generated if any unit fails so that the problems can be fixed and full operational security can be re-established in the system. More software related functions like CPU load, disk and memory utilization can also be included in the supervision via basic PC, Network and Software Monitoring (PNSM) functionality,
PNSM is one of the functions for the supervision of hardware in System 800xA. PNSM utilizes the supplier management software in the servers. PNSM access a few signals in the management software via SNMP and WMI cyclically. To achieve detailed information from the servers, the management interface is opened as a web link from System 800xA.
Supported servers are listed in linked document.