You can use Root Cause Analysis (RCA) to filter a set of events to determine the cause of a higher level system, service, or application problem. RCA can help you to eliminate apparent performance problems that may otherwise appear to be root causes but which are only side effects or symptoms of the actual root cause of the problem, allowing you to more quickly identify problem areas. You can view the RCA results on the home page or topology page of any service that is currently down. The topology page allows you to see a graphical representation of the service, system and component dependencies with the target(s) highlighted that RCA has implicated as causing the service failure.
Use the SMARTS Network Adapter Home page to view the status of the selected network adapter. From this page you can view availability information as well as all alerts associated with the network adapter target.
The status of the Network Adapter target should not be confused with the status of the network itself. You cannot use the network adapter target status to conclude that a switch or router is down. It is instead the status of the adapter itself which you can use to acquire information from SMARTS. If the home page reports that the target is down, it is indicating that the integration with SMARTS (the adapter) is broken.
Once the network adapter is configured and working, each time a service fails the adapter communicates with SMARTS to determine whether there are any network-related failures. The reported network failures are based on context the adapter sends to SMARTS about the service environment, including the hosts where its system components are located and the hosts where service tests are performed from Enterprise Manager Grid Control beacons.
If SMARTS identifies any network events related to the context passed to it for the failed service, those network events may be shown as possible causes of the service failure and also appear on the home page of the adapter in the list of alerts.
A single event reported by SMARTS may be associated with one or more service failures in Enterprise Manager Grid Control, but unrelated network events are not shown because not everything that SMARTS sees in the network makes its way back to Grid Control. If an event reported by SMARTS associated with a service failure as a cause appears in Grid Control, you can click on the message associated with the event and drill into the SMARTS console to see additional detail related to that event.
Related Topics
About the SMARTS Network Adapter
Enterprise Manager Information Roadmap
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