The watch dog process is part of the application and environment monitoring subsystem. This subsystem consists of several programs that allow the system integrator to detect run-time faults and take appropriate action.
The server process (RtapWDServer) periodically checks the health of various processes. The result is saved into a shared memory segment, and sent to the watchDog process. The watch dog process parses these messages, and saves the status into the database. Using the RTAP alarm sub-system, various actions can then be taken.
The watch dog process can be configured to periodically check the health of a remote RTAP environment. The process does this by sending a message to the remote environment's watch dog process.
Also provided is a custom RtapEnvLookup process that caches the environment directories.
For more information see the watchDog(1) man page and/or the RtapEnvLookup(1) man page.