View cluster events

- [voiceover] In Microsoft clustering and high availability, cluster events can happen at any time. And just like using the event viewer in windows, viewing cluster events can be a quick way to see if there's any trouble with the cluster. Let's take a look at the cluster events. Let's start by opening up failover cluster manager. We get there by going to tools and failover cluster manager. And then, we can expand the cluster itself. Then we can go down to click on cluster events.

You see there's quite a few events in here. Some of these are outdated, they've already been resolved while others may be new. You can check and see the latest events are going to be at the top. Then, you can see under the event details what's actually happening with the cluster. So, I find that the best way to handle any kind of events that aren't obvious on how to fix would be to copy part of the event and the event id and paste that into TechNet. You can go ahead and left-click and drag the mouse over a specific part of the event, make sure you donot include the name of the server because that's not going to be searchable, and the event id itself.

And, let's just go to technet.com. So, at TechNet you get a search option. And, in the search option you can go ahead and paste in the event id as well as the event. And, you'll see all different types of resolutions. There's also another way to see even more events and that is to go into the traditional event viewer mode. Let's go ahead and minimize our failover cluster manager and then go to tools and event viewer.

Let's expand our applications and services log. And, expand Microsoft and then windows. Now, we can scroll down and we'll see lots of different cluster events that aren't just in the failover cluster manager. There's cluster aware updating, which we covered in a previous video. And, if we scroll down, we'll see other clustering events just by clicking on them. And, anytime you see one of these red circles then you know that there is some sort of failure or other information that may be in there that could be useful.

If you see nothing then, it's possible that it's just information only. So, we have different types of events. We have admin events, diagnostic and then we have tracing events. The admin events are mostly going to be informational. Whereas, the diagnostic are going to show problems with hardware. And tracing, problems with network. The different classification of events are as follows. The white informational events basically just mean that something happened on the server, not necessarily anything bad, but you should be aware of it.

The warnings are the yellow triangle options and those types of events basically just let you know that something may be wrong, but the server is not sure. Then there's the error with a red circle and that means that a specific application or hardware device has failed, but it doesn't mean that the server itself is in any kind of jeopardy. The critical types of events mean that imminent failure is going to happen You cannot stop it. You need to be aware of what it is and try to resolve it before the server crashes or afterwards.

By reviewing cluster events, they can save you from potential imminent problems, but also help you fix a problem that may have already happened.