Many computer systems are used in fault tolerant environments such as the banking industry, airline industry, mercantile markets, and so forth. In such environments any downtime to a computer system caused by a computer system failure can be catastrophic to businesses and customers that rely on such systems. To safeguard against such failures, many computer systems rely on maintenance systems to monitor the health of the systems and take corrective action in the event problems are detected.
Unfortunately, many of these maintenance systems are unable to precisely diagnose the root cause of a problem or take corrective action fast enough to prevent the computer system from failing. To compound problems further, many maintenance systems monitor the health of computer systems by testing them in a “service mode.” Typically, when a computer is placed into a service mode, the normal operational mode of the computer system is interrupted or degraded. Additionally, the service mode creates an artificial testing atmosphere in which problems that may occur in the normal mode of operation never present themselves in the service mode, and hence, may go undetected, possibly jeopardizing the operating stability of the computer system.