Operational Messages
When something that may be of interest occurs, collectl calls an internal message reporting
routine and assigns that message a status of Informational, Warning, Error or Fatal.
The way collectl deals with these messages is controlled by several factors:
- If collectl is started as a daemon and the -m switch is specified, all messages will be
written the the message log in the collectl logging directory, the default being /var/log/collectl.
If this switch is not specified no messages are ever recorded and so it is recommended that
this switch, which is already in the collectl startup script, not be removed.
- When run interactively, all messages except those of type Informational are displayed on the
terminal.
- When run interactively and -m is specified, ALL messages are displayed on the terminal.
When collectl is not providing the desired results and it is not obvious why, adding this
switch can be helpful.
If a message of type Fatal is encountered, collectl will terminate. In all other cases it continues
executing, often skipping what it was trying to do when the error occurred.