I am working on an internal database monitoring system and am at a point where I sort of hit the wall in terms of application design.

Basically I have an extensible plugin architecture where I shall have an OK, a warning or an error upon running a db verification. My first question whether it is sufficient to have only one status reported with an optional status message or provide the ability to have more than one returned (with attached messages) and then calculate an aggregated overall status.

In particular in the latter case my second issue would be how to distinguish between two verification reports with the same status code (as it can come from different triggers). I would need to do this to see whether some change happened between the current and last verification. I could simply have string comparisons of the attached status messages mentioned above but that does not seem very reliable.