What is Service Management Facility?

Service Management Facility is a feature of the Solaris operating system as of version 10 and OpenSolaris-descendant illumos with its illumos distributions, that creates a supported, unified model for services and service management on each Solaris or illumos system and replaces init.d scripts. SMF introduces:

All these capabilities are made possible by treating Services as "first class objects". That is, they are more than just user-executed software to the OS. They can be defined to have special states that allow finer control and permit monitoring and probing for diagnosing software failures, rather than having the administrator or dedicated "restarter" modules kill and restart the service as before.