Feature: System Health

System health is both a subset and superset of PCP integration. In other words, health includes PCP-only health metrics, as well as non-PCP metrics.

Goals

• Display system status at a glance
• Provide ways to easily fix issues
• When an easy fix is not possible, provide information on how to resolve a problem

Examples

When no health issues are detected, the system should report a healthy state. The lists below are not the only problems that could occur (more could be added later), but are a starter list of possible issues with a system.

General health issues

Some of these issues have simple solutions that Cockpit can automatically fix.

1. Security-related software updates available
   • Click to view the software updates page
2. Issues mounting filesystems (as specified in fstab, etc.)
   • Display issues with the filesystem mounts, along with errors while mounting
3. Insufficient storage space on partitions
   • Show partitions with small amounts of space
4. SMART issues
   • Display issue, which may include:
     • Bad clusters on a disk
     • IO issues
5. Swap is currently active
   • Display warning that swap is active (PCP needs to be installed for more details; see below)
6. Issues with bringing up network interfaces
   • Show problematic network interfaces; click to switch to the network page
7. Enabled & running systemd service keeps restarting
   • Click to display service's page with its log visible

PCP-derived health issues

Several detectable issues require PCP to be installed to be accurate and/or useful. Most of these will not have a simple 1-click solution. Most will require displaying info and/or digging a bit further.

1. CPU load is constantly too high
   • Identify top offenders over a window of time and provide actions to stop/restart services and/or kill processes
2. Not enough memory is free
   • Identify top offenders and provide actions (similar to CPU load), suggest upgrading RAM
3. Swap is often used (PCP-enhanced version of swap rule above)
   • Related to not enough available memory issue (above)
   • Show top memory offenders while swap is active (this should help identify the offenders)
4. Network is constantly saturated
   • Show processes transferring the most data
5. Excessive waiting for storage (disk is >85% busy)
6. Huge page fragmentation/defragmentation (memory is fragmented and system is spending a lot of time shuffling chunks of memory around to defragment)
7. Network errors exist
8. Packet receive (RX) queue is too small, causing many packages to be dropped
   • Provide a means to specify a new queue length, with a suggested default

Mockups

• Health issues in overview page
• No issues in overview page

(Mockups are rough sketches and are not intended to be finalized or "pixel-perfect".)