Serviceability Message Severity Levels
Serviceability messages are categorized by their severity level, which provides important information about the situation that causes the program to issue the message. Every message's severity is defined in the text of the message itself (for example, NOTICE indicates that a message is an informational notice), and system administrators can route messages differently on the basis of their severity levels.
The following table lists the possible severity levels and provides an explanation for each.
Serviceability Message Severity Levels
| Name | Meaning |
| FATAL | Fatal error exit: An unrecoverable error (such as database corruption) has occurred and will probably require manual intervention to be corrected. The program usually terminates immediately after such an error. |
| ERROR | Error detected: An unexpected event that is non-terminal (such as a timeout), or is correctable by human intervention, has occurred. The program will continue operation, although some functions or services may no longer be available. This severity level may also be used to indicate that a particular request or action could not be completed. |
| WARNING | Correctable error: An error occurred that was automatically corrected (for example, a configuration file was not found, and default values were used instead). This severity level may also be used to indicate a condition that may be an error if the effects are undesirable (for example, removing all files as a side-effect of removing a non-empty directory). This severity level may also be used to indicate a condition that, if not corrected, will eventually result in an error (for example, a printer's running low on paper). |
| NOTICE | Informational notice: A significant routine major event has occurred; for example, a server has started. |
| NOTICE_VERBOSE | Verbose information notice: A significant routine event has occurred; for example, a directory entry was removed. |