### Serviceability Strategy

The serviceability mechanism is designed to be used mainly for server informational and error messaging - that is, for messages that are of interest to those who are concerned with server maintenance and administration (in the broadest sense of these terms). The essential idea of the mechanism is that all server events that are significant for maintaining or restoring normal operation should be reported in messages that are made to be self-documenting so that (provided all significant events have been correctly identified and reported) users and administrators will by definition always be able to learn what action they should take whenever anything out of the ordinary occurs. User-prompted, interactive, client-generated messaging should be handled through the DCE messaging interface, which is described in DCE Application Messaging.

It follows that serviceability is not just an interface; it is partly a state of mind. The first thing that a developer who wishes to use serviceability should do is examine his or her server code with a view to identifying all the event points that should be covered by serviceability calls. Once these have been determined, the sams file (containing the message definitions) should be written; the last step will be to insert the messaging calls into the code.

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