Pointing Fingers? DDM to the Rescue

Keith Brooks @LotusEvangelist Keith@vanessabrooks.comKeith Brooks @LotusEvangelist Keith@vanessabrooks.com
ADM09
Pointing Fingers?
DDM to the Rescue!
Keith Brooks
@Lotusevangelist
Wednesday, May 23 | 09:00 - 10:00 | B. Guadaloupe

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Keith Brooks
• Twitter: @lotusevangelist
• Skype: lotusevangelist
• Email/WW: keith@vanessabrooks.com
• Blog: https://blog.vanessabrooks.com
• Linkedin: https://linkedin.com/in/keithbrooks
• Slides: https://Slideshare.net/kbmsg
2& Scotch!
2012 – Present

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Best Practices
Tip #57: Domino Domain monitor keeps you safe
 Enable DDM
 Have DDM tell you when anonymous gets added
to a database over a certain level
 Have DDM tell you not only that there is a
problem, but suggests how to fix it!
 Have DDM bring you directly to the problem
 Monitoring software makes your life easier
(From LS10 Paul Mooney’s Session)

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History of DDM
Probes and Listeners inside DDM
Console Commands for DDM
Monitoring Non-Domino Items
DDM Can Tweet Now!
Salesforce Integration
ServiceNow Integration
Review and References
Today’s Topics:

Why Domino Domain Monitoring (DDM)
• At the time, there was no tool that provided a single
view of the overall status of multiple servers across
one or more DOMINO Domains
• Administrators can spend way too much time to find
out the cause when a server problem occurs
• The analysis and fix of the problems depends on the
experience and skill of the Administrator
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Background of DDM
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• In R7 it emerged from the old Stats and Events
databases
• DDM (ddm.nsf) itself is a reporting database
 It reports based on details that the Monitoring
Configuration (events4.nsf) db has defined
• Events (events4.nsf) is the real information
wrapped around by the ddm.nsf
• It is installed with every Domino Server …

Story Time, Sound Familiar?
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Everyone’s first time
with DDM
is ALWAYS the same

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DDM — Making Everyone Accountable
• Inside DDM you can:
• See issues and reporting of what is okay
• See who closed which items and issues
• Delegate problems to someone else
• Provide management with a dashboard
• Change severity of error messages
• Monitor ACLs, security, SMTP, and on and on as
long as it’s a Domino item*
• * There are ways to do this for non-Domino too, sort of, hang on, will get to that soon.

More Key Benefits
• Active monitoring capability: Probes with highly-
configurable schedules, content and targets
• Data aggregation with collection hierarchies
• Automatic problem determination and
determination of probable cause in multiple feature
areas, and provide possible solution.
• Automation of corrective actions
• Auto-closing for resolved problems
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History of DDM
DDM Can Tweet Now!
Service Now Integration
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Today’s Topics:

Default DDM Probes
Three types of probes:
• Scheduled probes - run according to a configurable
schedule - defaults are supplied
• Embedded probes - watch the feature area and catch
problems/issues as they occur
• Listening probes - run when particular error codes are
logged
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Configuration: Enable default DDM Probes
Types expand into subtypes ...
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Common Probe Examples
• Monitor for any errors encountered when compacting
database on Domino servers. (Database/Database
Compact)
• Monitor the configured database(s) to ensure that
replication occurs on the target servers within the
configured time interval. (Replication/Scheduled
Replication Checks)
• Monitor which documents are not replicating in the
Domino Directory. (Replication/Replication Errors)
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More Common Probes
• Monitor if name lookups are taking too long.
(Directory/Name Lookup/Search Response)
• Monitor CPU (55%: fatal) /Disk (30%: fatal) /Memory
(98%) Utilization on your Domino Servers. (Operating
System/CPU; Memory)
• Monitor the availability of all directories on the Domino
servers. (Directory/Directory Availability)
• Monitor and fix a corrupt database by the corrective
action code.
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Application Probes
• Monitor whether an agent (or Web agents) run by Agent
Manager took longer than X minutes to complete.
(Application Code/Long running agents)
• Monitor database(s) for unused space, generate an
event when the percent of 30% unused space is
exceeded then automatically compact the database(s) if
an event is generated. (Database/Scheduled Checks)
• Monitor a specific Notes DB for no access by any user
for one month.
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• Monitor mail routing to Domino and/or non-Domino mail
systems.(Messaging/Mail Reflector)
• Monitors the amount of mail on a Domino server and
whether the number of mail messages in the MAIL.BOX
file exceeds the number of mail messages that the router
can process. (Messaging/Mail Flow Statistic)
• Monitor whether your SMTP servers are listening on the
appropriate ports. (Messaging/SMTP process state)
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Monitor What?

• Monitor whether NRPC mail routing is occurring on
the Mail Servers. (Messaging/NRPC Routing Status)
• Monitor which AdminP requests are being generated,
and whether they are being processed.
(Server/Administration)
• Monitor any ACL changes for a specific database.
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More Monitor What?

Questions We Asked IBM/HCL
• Why is there no task probe for Traveler, for that matter why
not for Sametime?
• Traveler and Sametime are not with Domino out of the box and
when DDM was created it was focused on only out of the box
tasks.
• Can we get DDM to Tweet?
• DDM only creates events, so it can’t directly tweet. However,
events can have event handlers act upon them including run a
program. So in theory you could setup an event handler to do
this, but DDM doesn't do this out of the box.
• Domino 10 has no planned updates at this time per
Barry Rosen.
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Questions We Asked IBM/HCL #2
• Can DDM probe for HTTP when it is not port 80 and
if so, how do we tell it to use port 8088 as an
example?
• DDM uses what's configured for HTTP. So either they both use
8080 or 80. It would be looking in the server doc for the
configuration.
• Can DDM probe that a website is up and running?
Seems we can open a db, but not a web app. Is this
true?
• The HTTP probe can just probe the port or GET a URL, but it
will only check for the successful fetching of that URL, the
HTTP return code.
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Questions We Asked IBM/HCL #3
• I have not seen how I configure DDM to verify an
HTTP website, it seems we can only verify if HTTP is
running as a service.
• Correct, the DDM HTTP only probes the service, but the Event
Generator -> TCP Server probe has the web page option
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Someone asked about Differences
See Ben Menesi at Ytria for more details
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History of DDM
DDM Can Tweet Now!
Today’s Topics:

Console Commands
• View DDM probe schedule
• show sch –ddm
• Shows a table of enabled probes and next scheduled run time
Probe
• View enabled probes
• tell event dumpprobes
• Shows a list of enabled DDM probes by note ID
• Run probes manually
• tell event runprobe ?????
• Run a probe with note ID ????? immediately (designed to be used
with the dumpprobes command)
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History of DDM
Time Out for Crazy Messages
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Attack of the Ambiguous Error Messages
• Cannot process Full Text Index (FTI)
• Admin Process: Gone Fishing/Org does not appear in design
elements of any database designating Server/Demo as their
Administration Server
• SMTP Failed to Connect to us.ibm.com
• Gone Fishing/Org attempted to login to Server/Demo
• SSL Error: Keyring File access error
• Unable to replicate or route mail
• Calendar profile error
• Events database missing documents or duplicated
• Unable to compact compact no such file exists (program doc
added compact twice?)

Troubleshooting Ambiguous Error Messages
 DDM does not always provide any details
 Check your server console
 The answer may be staring you in the face, if not, search
your log.nsf file for the text of the error
 Check that you are running enough debug level in your log to
show these errors
 Dig deeper within the system from the Administrator monitoring
and analysis tools to the DCT
 Google, Planetlotus.org, Bloggers, IBM Support

History of DDM
DDM Can Tweet Now!
References and Review
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Today’s Topics:

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DDM
Making Admins Lives Easier
….
While Teaching Exchange
Admins What a Real Server
Can Do

4 Steps
1. Open events4.nsf
2. Open DDM Configuration->DDM
Probes Section-> By Type
3. Click on New DDM Probe ->
Messaging
4. Add configuration details and Save

Steps 3 & 4 Details
Click on New DDM Probe -> Messaging
• Probe Subtype = Transfer Queue Check
• Probe Description = Whatever you Want it to Say
• Which Servers to run on? Special Target Servers->
SMTP Servers
• Destination? Check All Destinations or Specify that
special one 
• Services NRPC and/or SMTP
• Set Event Severity (not too low i.e group emails)
• Save

Over? Nothing is Over Until…
The Probe will be enabled on Save
So how do you get notified?
Glad you asked….

1. DDM Configuration->Event Handlers Section-> By
Author
2. Click on New Event Handler from the Db menu
3. Event Tab (can be any type)
• Events must be one of these severities: FATAL! And/or
Failure, Send them all of them 
• Events can have ANY message
4. Action Tab
• Method = Mail
• Mailing Address = Domino Email and Personal Email
of the MS ADMINS!
• Enablement = Enable this notification
You Don’t! You send it to the MS Admins

Keep in Mind
1. If Exchange is down, how would they get this? That’s
why we use personal emails
2. Include the CIO/CEO or whomever needs to know
Exchange fails
3. Set up a Mail Rule in your mail file to collect them all
and publish a monthly outage report
4. If you have the skills, add a view into the DDM to
ONLY show the Exchange outages to your executives

History of DDM
DDM Can Tweet Now!
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Today’s Topics:

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We want Twitter updates!
We are not Developers (Well I’m Not)
This works for me
https://uptimerobot.com/
Monitors ports, websites, etc..
Notifies you via email, Twitter, SMS
They have their own APIs
Integrate into:
Slack and HipChat and PushOver
One Possible Solution

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Hi,
The monitor VBI-SMTP (http://www.vanessabrooks.com) is currently DOWN (Port Is
Not Listening).
Uptime Robot will alert you when it is back up.
Sincerely,
Uptime Robot
http://uptimerobot.com, http://twitter.com/uptimerobot,
http://facebook.com/uptimerobot
The monitor C_Q (http://quickr.clientsite.com) is back UP (HTTP 200 - OK) (It
was down for 44 minutes and 6 seconds).

History of DDM
DDM Can Tweet Now!
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Today’s Topics:

Integration Part 1
• Email-to-Case requires downloading the Email-to-Case
Agent (contact your Salesforce Customer Support).
• The Agent allows you to keep all email traffic within your
network’s firewall and to accept emails larger than 25 MB
from customers.
• Install the Agent behind your network’s firewall.
• Enable Email-to-Case and configure the settings.
• Configure your routing address settings to customize the
way Salesforce handles your customer emails.
• https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=setting_up_email-to-case.htm&type=5
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Integration Part 2
• Test your email routing addresses by manually sending
emails to them and verify that these emails convert to
cases based on their routing address settings.
• Add the email address that you configured to your
company's support website. Customers can use this
email address to submit cases to your support team.
• Add the Email Quick Actions to the Cases page layout.
• Optionally, create email templates agents can use when
replying to email. These templates can include merge
fields that display information from the original email in
the reply.

History of DDM
DDM Can Tweet Now!
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Today’s Topics:

Integration Part 1
• Users can continue to use email to request help
from IT after you begin using Express incident
management.
• Before you begin, determine your instance email
address. Identify how to train users to compose
email and create incidents.
• Your company was issued an email address for
your instance, typically:
instancename@service-now.com
• When users send email to this address,
the Express platform inserts an Incident record.
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Integration Part 2
• Create an email message addressed to
your Express instance,
typically instancename@service-now.com.
• Compose the email, and note the following
considerations.
• The email subject contains the incident Short Description.
• The email body is added as an incident comment.
• The incident category is Inquiry/Help.
• The incident state is New.
• Send the email message.
• Note: If you want all incidents to come through your service desk,
deactivate the service catalog incident record producer and the
email inbound action for new incidents.
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History of DDM
DDM Can Tweet Now!
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Today’s Topics:

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 DDM is free and running ... use it
 YOU decide what to monitor and YOU should be
monitoring!
 Be Proactive, not just Reactive
 Edit common issues that are unique to your
organization so the next admin has it easier
 Careful not to flood your inbox with warnings
 Management can have a dashboard with colors, give it
to them!
 Ambiguous error messages are a thing of the past
7 Key Points to Take Home

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• Planetlotus.org – 150+ Lotus/ICS Bloggers
• DDM: If You Only Knew What Your Server Was Saying by Keith Brooks
• IBM Wiki Domino 9.0.1
 http://www-
01.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SSKTMJ_9.0.1/admin/admn_dominodo
mainmonitoring_c.dita
 Philip Monson, Thomas Gumz, Frank Nostrame, Leah Busque, “Lotus
Domino Domain Monitoring” (IBM Redbook, 2005).
 http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/redp4089.html
 https://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpapers/pdfs/redp4089.pdf See page 48
about how to work with tcp ports
Resources

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• This workshop introduces you to DDM ...Lotus Education on
Demand: Domino Domain Monitoring
http://www.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg27007060
• Notes/Domino Best Practices: Domino Domain Monitoring
• http://www.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg27009312
• IBM Open Mic on DDM – For Administrators pdf
• Server Console in a Notes Client http://www.preemptive.com.au/node/44
More Resources

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Keith Brooks
@lotusevangelist
keith@vanessabrooks.com
Thank You

Pointing Fingers? DDM to the Rescue

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