Chad Scott

I've worked in Domino support for nearly five years, and in that time I've learned that the various monitoring tools included with the product tend to be drastically underutilized by customers. I think it's largely a problem of quantity; there are so many tools that it can be hard to know where to begin. As such, I'm going to cover a multipart introduction to Domino monitoring to help administrators get started using this powerful suite of features.

We'll begin by looking at statistics, monitoring's most basic building block. Domino captures a wide range of statistics by default, and these can be viewed in the Administration client on the Server -> Statistics tab or by running the console command "show stat". You can drill down on individual statistics through the Admin client or run a modified version of the console command to retrieve specific statistics (e.g. 'show stat Server.AvailabilityIndex'). These are great tools for getting a quick snapshot of a particular statistic, but most of the value lies in tracking statistics over time, and it certainly isn't practical to refresh the Admin client or run the console command repeatedly.

To solve this problem, you can create a Statistic Collection document that, not surprisingly, collects statistics. Once a statistic collection document is in place, snapshots of statistics from your servers will be saved to statrep.nsf, giving you an archive of prior statistics. A word of warning: statrep.nsf can grow very large if you let it. The database has a default document purge interval of 14 days, and you should think long and hard before changing it. Note also that statrep.nsf is not a replica throughout the domain. If you decide to make statrep.nsf replicate to all servers, make sure you plan accordingly. If you have a lot of servers, it's a near guarantee that this database will be huge.

With a Statistic Collection document in place, you will be able to leverage additional monitoring features that will make your life much easier. And really, isn't that the goal of every administrator? I'll cover one of those additional features--statistic charting--in Part 2.