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

It's worth saying this explicitly: monitoring systems have two differentpurposes, one of which is sort of a subset of the other (but notnecessarily).

The first purpose of monitoring, and what many people initially installa system for, is alerting, letting you when there are problems. Thesecond purpose of monitoring is tracking, gathering ongoing data forhistorical analysis; this is part of the vital work of gettingstatistics . Put this way, it's clear that these twooverlap (sometimes badly )

Here is something important to remember when designing systems andinterfaces: users are lazy . Worse, not only are users lazy butthey're very good at detecting pointless work.

What is pointless work? Simple: it's work that the user doesn't see anyvisible benefit from performing (or doesn't understand the benefit andso discounts it, or feels that the benefit is a lot smaller than you'remaking it out to be). Of course, the work is not pointless to you