What is intended meaning of Status object for Temps/Fans?

The Health value should indicate that there is an issue with the device itself. So yes, for a fan speed lower than target, that would be a direct issue with the device. Communication issues or other faults may reside elsewhere, so indicating a Warning/Critical Health may cause a user to do something that would not correct the issue (e.g. replacing a fan when the cable was just disconnected). So care should be taken to try to indicate the source of the fault to drive corrective actions.

I would suggest that a communication fault may be better surfaced using the State property using "UnavailableOffline" or other non-functional states.



Absent means that the underlying device/hardware is not present. For items like fans and power supplies, that's clear. For a temperature reading (sensor), that sensor is very likely embedded in a piece of hardware, and so it's "both". The Absent state is useful for implementations where there's a fixed number of places for these items to appear, and those locations have fixed functions or meaning - so providing the "if you add a component, it's temperature will show up here" information can be useful to clients for discovery of capabilities.



With an 'Absent' State, most properties will not be supported because there's no hardware/device present to provide data. And Redfish states that unsupported properties are not returned (to avoid providing misleading data). So Status->Health is likely not included in payload.

Hope that helps,

Jeff