Watchdogs

A watchdog is a mechanism for detecting system states (e.g. full filesystems, database failures, etc.) that require immediate attention by project staff. Typically the desired response to such a condition is to notify a pager, sending a short text description.

BOINC provides a framework for defining watchdogs:

• A set of watchdog scripts are run from cron. Each script checks for an error condition, and present, it appends a descriptive line to an error log file. An example is wd_nresults_changing.php, which makes sure that the number of results changes.
• The script wd.php, also run from cron, scans the error log files. If any has been updated since the last run, it sends email to a set of recipients, containing the last line of the file.