# Operational Messages

When something that may be of interest occurs, collectl calls an internal message reporting routine and assigns that message a status of Informational, Warning, Error or Fatal. In all cases, if a message of type Fatal is encountered, collectl will terminate. In all other cases it continues executing, often skipping what it was trying to do when the error occurred. The way collectl deals with these messages is controlled by several factors:

Interactive Messages

- Informational messages are never displayed on the terminal.
- Warnings are only displayed if --quiet has not been specified
- Errors and Fatal messages are always reported
- If -m is specified, ALL messages are displayed on the terminal. When collectl is not providing the desired results and it is not obvious why, adding this switch can be helpful.

Daemon Mode Messages, requires -f and -m

- If collectl is started as a daemon and the -m switch is specified, all messages will be written to the message log in the collectl logging directory, the default being /var/log/collectl. If this switch is not specified no messages are ever recorded and so it is recommended that this switch, which is already in the collectl startup script, not be removed.
- Any messages of type Error or Fatal are also sent to syslog, but again only if logging is enabled with -m.

updated Feb 21, 2011