One of the reasons that alerting is a tough problem to solve well iswhat I'll call the dependency problem. It goes like this: imagine thatyou have a nice monitoring system and it's keeping track of all sortsof things in your environment. One day you get a huge string of alerts,reporting that server after server is down. Oh, and also a networkswitch isn't responding.

Of course, the real problem is that the switch has died. It's beingcamouflaged behind

Suppose that you have a Solaris fileserver and a bunch of NFS clients(in this case they're Linux machines, but I don't think it matters).Perhaps one or two of them are Samba servers. Further suppose that yourclient machines start reporting things like ' fcntl() failed: No locksavailable '. What is limiting you, and what do you do about it?

(We'll assume that you use tools like lslk to rule out some process ona client machine holding on to