Computer Diagnostics - Siemens

Computer diagnostics
test should work their
way up the Diagnostics
Pyramid: quick tests
first, then investigate
in more detail,
if necessary.
System design
Root causes for computer system failures
can sometimes be easily detected or require
extensive benchmarking and analysis
in other cases. In order to most efficiently
narrow down a symptom to the
root cause, a systematic approach has
been developed, that operates on several
levels, which are shown in the Diagnostics
Pyramid below.
An analysis showed, that many problems
can be detected, just by taking an inventory
snapshot of the system and compare
the found components, devices and setting
with a given specification. This scan
takes only a couple of seconds and can
already reveal a lot of information, when
compared with previous runs. The Inventory
level basically answers the question:
„Is everybody there?“
Tests on the Monitoring level take longer,
but reveal information about the current
health status and changing dynamic data.
Examples are: CPU temperature, fan
speeds, number of remapped disk sectors,
SMART trips, network errors etc.
These are answers to the question: „Is
everybody doing well?“
The Diagnostics level tests the hardware
according to load profiles, tailored to the
particular usage scenario of that system.
These tests will typically not be run every
day, but can be useful during a scheduled
service period. These tests can easily run
Order of Test Execution
Duration/Cost of Tests
several minutes to several hours. They
can cover CPU stress tests, hard disk performance
tests, memory or network tests
and especially combinations of these
tests. The question to be answered here
is: „Is everybody performing okay?“
Eventually, CODIAG could evolve into an
Expert System in the future. Currently,
planned features for the next version is to
fully integrate CHSBench which is a standalone
tool today.
Internal Architecture
From the start, the core of CODIAG was
developed to be as operating system and
platform independent as possible. Analyzing
the defects found in our repair center,
we defined a set of items that should
be inventoried and monitored. The underlying
data source for each item varies
between hardware platforms and operating
systems.
Currently we use three data providers:
• operating system’s standard information
sources, e.g. WMI, process tables,
registry etc.
• vendor tools, e.g. FTS Deskview
• system category explorer (SCE), a library
interface to access hardware information,
which is normally not exposed
via the other two methods, e.g.
hard disk settings, cache settings etc.
Expert
System
System Analysis
»What is wrong?«
»How can it be fixed?«
Diagnosis
Performability Check
»Is everybody fit & performing OK?«
Monitoring
(of „technical“, dynamic parameters)
Availability Check
»Is everybody doing well?«
Inventory
(of „logistical“, static parameters)
Visibility Check
»Is everybody there?«
Expected Frequency of Faults
Future
FY
10/11
FY
09/10
FY
08/09
CODIAG
&
CHSBENCH
CODIAG
(combined with
FTS DeskView
and other
vendor tools)
Timeline Tools
4