The system or device is down or is imminent danger of going down. This is the highest alarm level and generally receives instant attention. Examples are one or more down services or performance degradation which renders a service or server virtually unusable. Again, all monitoring type are capable of generating this type of alarm. Examples would be high CPU utilization which lasts only for a few minutes or a Port Check which fails once but then returns without error.
Minor alarms can foretell larger failures in the future and as such are important to know about.
All monitoring types have the potential to generate alarms which are in this category although the most useful information will come from SNMP and ITO Agent monitoring. This would include isolated failed login attempts, general error log reporting, minor network interface errors, etc. Often times these types of messages are helpful in troubleshooting a larger or more serious problem. Only SNMP and ITO Agent monitoring is capable of generating this level of granularity in error reporting. This includes successful logins, successful completion of cron or scheduler tasks, successful backups, normal traffic through an interface, etc.