Domino Domain Monitoring, Letting Admins Sleep Later and Stay at Pubs Longer Since 2005

DDM, Letting Admins Sleep
Later and Stay at Pubs Longer
Since 2005
Keith Brooks
Rent This Space

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7th Sutol Conference, November 2015

Keith Brooks
• Twitter: @lotusevangelist
• Skype: lotusevangelist
• Email: keith@vanessabrooks.com
• Blog:
http://blog.vanessabrooks.com
• Linkedin:
http://linkedin.com/in/keithbrooks
• Slides: http://Slideshare.net/kbmsg
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Today’s Topics:
History of DDM
Probes and Listeners inside of
DDM
Console Commands for DDM
Monitoring Non-Domino Items
DDM Can Tweet Now!
References and Review
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Why Domino Domain Monitoring (DDM)
• At the time there was no tool that can provide
a single view of the overall status of multiple
servers across one or more DOMINO
Domains
• Administrators can spend 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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7th Sutol Conference, November 2015Background of DDM
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• Started with R7 although its history goes back to
Stats and Events
• DDM (ddm.nsf) is a reporting database
• It reports based on details that the Monitoring
Configuration (events4.nsf) database has defined
• Events (events4.nsf) is the real information
wrapped around by the ddm.nsf
• It is installed with every copy of Domino yet many
never use it … why?
• If you use it, you probably set it up once and
never looked at it again ... right?

7th Sutol Conference, November 2015Sound Familiar?
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 Your server is crying out in pain and
you don’t hear it, or worse, ignore it …
at your peril.
 Daily, hourly it suffers in silence
because you do not let it talk to you.
 You know it can talk, right?
 You turn DDM on and it talks….non-
stop!
 So you shut DDM off again.

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DDM — Making Everyone Accountable
 Inside DDM you can:
 See if everything is okay or not
 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.

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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
DDM Can Tweet Now!

7th Sutol Conference, November 2015Default DDM Probes
Three flavors of probes (some probes have
more than one):
• 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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7th Sutol Conference, November 2015More 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.
• Delegation of problems
• Automation of corrective actions
• Auto-closing for resolved problems 13

Configuration: Enable default DDM Probes
Types expand into subtypes ...
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7th Sutol Conference, November 2015Common Probes
• 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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7th Sutol Conference, November 2015Common 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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7th Sutol Conference, November 2015Application 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 exceeds, then automatically
compact the database(s) if an event is
generated. (Database/Scheduled Checks)
• Monitor a specific Notes DB with no access
by any user for one month. 17

• 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) 18
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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Monitor What?

Last Minute Developer/PM Info
• 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. The Traveler task can be monitored
by the Administrator client
• Can we get DDM to Tweet?
– DDM only creates events, so it can directly tweet.
However, event 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.
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Last Minute Developer/PM Info #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. 21

• 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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Last Minute Developer/PM Info #3

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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!

7th Sutol Conference, November 2015Console 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) 25

History of DDM
Time Out for Crazy Messages
DDM Can Tweet Now!
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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?)

Attack of the Ambiguous Error Message — Troubleshooting
• So now what? The great DOMINO has spoken, you must
resolve the problem, but how?
 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 new DCT
 Google, Planetlotus.org, Bloggers, IBM Support
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History of DDM
DDM Can Tweet Now!
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DDM
Making Admins Lives Easier
….
While Teaching Exchange
Admins What a Real Server
Can Do

7th Sutol Conference, November 20154 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

7th Sutol Conference, November 2015Steps 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….

7th Sutol Conference, November 2015Notification
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 or Internet
Email of the MS ADMINS!
– Enablement = Enable this notification
Not 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

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History of DDM
DDM Can Tweet Now!

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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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 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 – 315+ Lotus Bloggers especially, Andy Pedisich who
gives a much more detailed session on DDM
• 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_do
minodomainmonitoring_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
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=swg270070
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• Notes/Domino Best Practices: Domino Domain Monitoring
• http://www.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg2700
9312
• IBM Open Mic on DDM – For Administrators pdf
• Add Server Console to a Notes Client
http://www.preemptive.com.au/node/44
More Resources

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Thank you
Keith Brooks
@lotusevangelist
keith@vanessabrooks.com

Domino Domain Monitoring, Letting Admins Sleep Later and Stay at Pubs Longer Since 2005

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