systemd_device_unit_failed_state

Alerts
1

systemd_device_units_state

Linux | Systemd units

Systemd is a suite of basic building blocks for a Linux system. It provides a system and service manager that runs as PID 1 and starts the rest of the system.

The Netdata Agent monitors the systemd.device units. The systemd_device_units_state alert indicates that one or more of the systemd.device units have failed. A systemd device unit “failed” when the service process returned error code on exit, or crashed, an operation timed out, or after too many restarts. The cause of a failed states is stored in a log.

Read More About systemd

Here is some useful information about systemd from
Wikipedia 1

Systemd includes features like on-demand starting of daemons, snapshot support, process tracking, and Inhibitor Locks. Systemd is not just the name of the init daemon, but also refers to the entire software bundle around it, which, in addition to the systemd init daemon, includes the daemons journald, logind and networkd, and many other low-level components. In January 2013, Poettering described systemd not as one program, but rather a large software suite that includes 69 individual binaries. As an integrated software suite, systemd replaces the startup sequences and runlevels controlled by the traditional init daemon, along with the shell scripts executed under its control. systemd also integrates many other services that are common on Linux systems by handling user logins, the system console, device hotplugging, scheduled execution (replacing cron), logging, hostnames and locales.

Like the init daemon, systemd is a daemon that manages other daemons, which, including systemd
itself, are background processes. systemd is the first daemon to start during booting and the last daemon to terminate during shutdown. The systemd daemon serves as the root of the user space’s process tree. The first process (PID1) has a special role on Unix systems, as it replaces the parent of a process when the original parent terminates. Therefore, the first process is particularly well suited for the purpose of monitoring daemons.

Systemd executes elements of its startup sequence in parallel, which is theoretically faster than the traditional startup sequence approach. For inter-process communication (IPC), systemd makes Unix domain sockets and D-Bus available to the running daemons. The state of systemd itself can also be preserved in a snapshot for future recall.

Systemd’s core components include the following:

  • systemd is a system and service manager for Linux operating systems.

  • systemctl is a command to introspect and control the state of the systemd system and service
    manager. Not to be confused with sysctl.

  • systemd-analyze may be used to determine system boot-up performance statistics and retrieve
    other state and tracing information from the system and service manager.

More On systemd-`.device` Units

A unit configuration file whose name ends in .device encodes information about a device unit as exposed in the sysfs/udev(7) device tree. udev provides a dynamic device directory containing only the files for actually present devices. It creates or removes device node files in the /dev directory, or it renames network interfaces.

This unit type has no specific options. Device units are named after the /sys and /dev paths they control. For example, the device /dev/sda5 is exposed in systemd as dev-sda5.device.

References and Source
  1. systemd on wikipedia
  2. man page for systemd.device

Troubleshooting Section:

General Approach

If a device has failed, then you should always try to gather more information about the cause of the failure.

  1. Identify which device units fail. Open the Netdata dashboard, find the current active alarms under the active alarms tab and look into its chart (systemdunits_device_units.device_unit_state). In this chart, identify which device units are in state with value 5.

  2. Check the status of the device

    root@netdata~ # systemctl status  <device_name>.device