SMF Administrative and Programming Interfaces

This section introduces the interfaces that are available when you use SMF.

SMF Command-Line Administrative Utilities

SMF provides a set of command-line utilities that interact with SMF and accomplish standard administrative tasks. The following utilities can be used to administer SMF.

Table 16-1 Service Management Facility Utilities

Command Name	Function
`inetadm`	Provides the ability to observe or configure services controlled by `inetd`
`svcadm`	Provides the ability to perform common service management tasks, such as enabling, disabling, or restarting service instances
`svccfg`	Provides the ability to display and manipulate the contents of the service configuration repository
`svcprop`	Retrieves property values from the service configuration repository with a output format appropriate for use in shell scripts
`svcs`	Gives detailed views of the service state of all service instances in the service configuration repository

Service Management Configuration Library Interfaces

SMF provides a set of programming interfaces that are used to interact with the service configuration repository through the svc.configd daemon. This daemon is the arbiter of all requests to the local repository datastores. A set of fundamental interfaces is defined as the lowest level of interaction possible with services in the service configuration repository. The interfaces provide access to all service configuration repository features such as transactions and snapshots.

Many developers only need a set of common tasks to interact with SMF. These tasks are implemented as convenience functions on top of the fundamental services to ease the implementation burden.