Monitoring the health of your Domino servers

[rob@xxxxxxxxx]

I went to the as400connection conference.  Heard a presentation by Greg 
Hintermeister of IBM entitled "Monitoring the Health of your System".  He 
used iSeries Navigator, or iNav, to tell if Domino servers are running.  I 
tried it out (with some customization) and it works pretty well.  Let's 
get started...

Start, All Programs, IBM iSeries Access for Windows, iSeries Navigator
If you do not have iSeries Navigator then:
  Start, All Programs, IBM iSeries Access for Windows, Selective Setup
  and install almost all options of iSeries Navigator,
  especially all Management Central options
Once in Navigator, expand Management Central.  You might have to pick a 
central system at this time.
If you do not have the Management Central part of iSeries Navigator then:
  Start, All Programs, IBM iSeries Access for Windows, Selective Setup
  and install almost all options of iSeries Navigator,
  especially all Management Central options
Expand Monitors
Select Job Monitors
Right click on Job and select New Monitor
Give it a name.  For example "Monitor Domino server xyz".
Under Subsystem select the subsystem associated with that Domino server. 
You can determine this with the 5250 command WRKDOMSVR.
Click Add
Under Metrics, select Job Count, Click Add.  Under threshold 1 select 
Enable trigger.  Do a WRKDOMSVR, then a 9=Work server jobs.  Count all 
jobs except the subsystem.  Subtract 1 or 2 that may be temp jobs like a 
scheduled replication, etc.  Put this number in the number of jobs. Change 
the greater sign to a less than sign.
In trigger command you can use some i5 command.  At our shop we use a 
custom command to send email out without Domino.  And the email goes to a 
few Domino users, cell phones, etc.
In the actions tab you may want to restrict this to 8-5 Monday thru 
Friday.  If the Domino server is down for a backup, do you want to get 
paged in the middle of the night?
Under Sharing I selected controlled.  This allows others to start the 
monitor if I am out of the office.  They cannot change anything else.

Repeat for each Domino server listed in WRKDOMSVR.

There is a "Servers to monitor" tab that lists Domino.  However, for 
systems with multiple DPARS that may not give the granularity to send out 
a detailed message like "Domino server xyz is not running".  You would be 
limited to "Since we normally have 500 jobs running underneath QNOTES and 
now we only have 450 you may want to check into what is not running".

You may want to vary the number of jobs by DPAR.  For example a typical 
domino server here has anywhere from 15 to 22 jobs.  However our SAMETIME 
server has at least 50.  We set that server to anything less than 45 let 
us know.

Rob Berendt