Finger Pointing? DDM to the Rescue

The Engage event has been going well and my session was this morning.
I wanted to make my slides available to everyone that needed it, especially the ServiceNow and Salesforce customers.

As always, feel free to ask me any questions.

In a later conversation today with the HCL team the recommendation is to go to newrelic.com and manage your reports and issues in a modern way that allows for tweets or IMs or however you want to be notified.

Pointing Fingers? DDM to the Rescue from Keith Brooks

Collaborate on a Boat! Come to Engage in Rotterdam With Me

The best way to start your summer vacation is to attend Theo's #1 European Lotus/ICS event. (Click on the picture to go to the website)

As the sign says, I will be speaking at Engage and I hope to see you there.

About my session:

ADM09 - "Pointing Fingers? DDM to the RescueWednesday, May 23 | 09:00 - 10:00 | B. Guadaloupe
Cloud Hybrid? Mixed domains? Gmail, Microsoft and Notes coexisting? Domino DDM (Domino Domain Monitoring) to the rescue. Ok, maybe not rescue, but at least you will know who is down and what service is downBEFORE your users. Old School gets a new lease on life, or for those who never use it, this is your chance to learn about it.

Look forward to seeing you there as well as numerous IBM Champions like myself that are presenting and attending.

I Love Admins that want to learn here is my SUTOL Session

Having a great time in Prague, last time I was here was either the I AM tour or an LCTY in 2000/2001.

Martin and the SUTOL team did a great job with the event. It was really nice to get to see people I either never met in person or have not seen in a long time. And some of us had been at #soccnx 9 last week in Stuttgart.

It was great to speak to and meet so many admins that really know what they are doing and what to learn and know more. These Admins make it easier to present topics from new viewpoints and appreciate the time we all spend in the trenches.

As it turns out, the night before SUTOL while we are at the local bar we discussed some things around DDM and we agreed things changed, but could not at the time find good details about what and when. Luckily, when we collaborate we find conclusions.

Thanks to Ben Menesi for not only pointing out Domino DDM changed types, but having a screen that shows the changes which I added to my presentation.

I also found a reference to what happened, it changed in 8.0 and this link had this to say:

To view an event message that was generated by a pre-IBM^® Lotus^® Domino^® 7 event generator, open the Monitoring Configuration database (EVENTS4.NSF), and then open the view Advanced -- Message by Text to view how that event message is categorized in DDM. The information on the Basics panel shows the name of the new Event Type and the Old Event Type. In DDM, there are 10 event types and in pre-Domino 7, there are 22 event types. You use the information on the Basics panel to see how the old event types are incorporated into the new event types. For example, this event message has Server as the Event Type and Mail as the Old Event Type

My slides from my session, "DDM, Letting Admins sleep longer and stay at the Pub Later Since 2005" is available on Slideshare. I touch on how to manage non-Domino things and how I get my server and DDM to Tweet me when there are problems, like email is not flowing.

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

Thank you everyone and hope you enjoyed the session.

Who's Meeting me in Prague at Sutol 2015?

The nice people in charge of SUTOL 2015 in Prague on November 11 have granted me a session at their technical conference.

Thank you Martin Jinoch and team (@sutolcz) for letting this IBM Champion visit and meet everyone!

Luckily for me this year they are not making us present in Czech have opened the event up to English speakers.

With an expected 200 people coming that are Admins or Developers, they expect a nice size audience for the sessions.

My topic, one which I have spoken about at The View Admin and Lotusphere/Connect:

"DDM, Letting Admins Sleep later and stay at Pubs longer since 2005"

I will not be hacking DDM (Domino Domain Monitor) in this session, but we will be covering:
The basics for those who do not use it yet (shame on you!)
Notifications and what to do with them
Pros and Cons to so much knowledge
Tricks and Tips along the way
How to Manage your Exchange Admins or SAP or whatever...even IBM SmartCloud via DDM
Plus more ways to keep yourself happy after hours and on weekends.
Edited: At last I can do something I wanted for some time as an admin that DDM doesn't, but you have to come to hear/see it first.

I will be coming in the day before and leaving late on the 11th so if you need me to visit your office or help you in any way, please let me know in advance.

See you in Prague!

Oh and I ran across this for my fellow non Czech speaking attendees: http://www.fluentin3months.com/why-czech-isnt-as-hard-to-learn-as-you-think/

SpeedGeeking 2015 "How to Manage Exchange Admins (and their servers) with Domino"

Speedgeeking was awesome, as usual. We hope you enjoyed it, learned something, and of course drank, ate and had fun.

For those that ask, here are my slides up in SlideShare, these are the clean editions, if you were there, you will understand.

SnTT - Mixed Email Server Environments Monitoring

If you are an IBM Collaboration Software Lotus Domino Administrator and you have a mixed messaging environment that involves gateways, relays or any other type of forwarding, you really should be using DDM (Domino Domain Monitoring) and the Events4.nsf database.

Last year at MWLUG I gave a session to a packed room on the basics of DDM, can grab it here.

This year I am speaking at The View's Admin Conference in Las Vegas June 22-24 for the 2nd year in a row and one of my 3 sessions is about DDM for the uninitiated.

So what is so special about this for DDM that you should use it for mixed environments? Ever have mail stop flowing to one of them(Exchange Connector), long time no messages from it? How would you know unless the executives or help desk told you? Hopefully few of you reading this find out this way.

The smarter way is of course to use either built-in and FREE tools or a 3rd party tool like RPR Wyatt's Vital Signs or GSX's Monitor. Note: We have a relationship with both of these great products.

But FREE is for me..and you.

DDM actually is a nice GUI that wraps around the events4.nsf but I use DDM as the terminology to represent stats and alarms. If it wasn't for the probes I set up I would be constantly putting out fires and taking phone calls never ending at a time when I need to be focused on the clients problems.

How do you enable DDM probes? Here are the steps:

1. Open the events4.nsf
2. Click on DDM probes from the list in the Left column
3. Select By Type
4. Click on "New DDM Probe" from the sub menu
5. Select Messaging from the drop down list
6. A new window will open with details to be filled in.
7. Probe Subtype, look at the list
8. Select Mail Flow Statistic Check or whatever else your heart desires
9. Enter a description if you want, like "This will let us know when Exchange crashes"
10. Select which servers it should run on. Hint your mail server or gateways
11. Select a destination or leave it as all
12. Select Services
13. Finally on thispage select the limits you can accept. keep in mind if you set it to 1 email you will get MANY notifications. I like to set it to a retry of 3-5 and a message count exceeds 30 for Fatal but it is up to you.
14. Click Save and Close
15. Done

And now you have a probe to check for problems. You can then go to your DDM and look at the nice GUI Dashboard and see when you have issues. Keep this running on the giant 42" LCD monitor 24x7.

Or you could have run the Setup Wizards from the left column. But where would your education be if everything was simple? How would you ever troubleshoot a problem again? Yes I am talking to the Exchange admins.

But if you read my blog regularly, you know I am a lazy admin. I prefer to be proactive not reactive, so I spend my time upfront configuring events to notify me when something is wrong. Looking at DDM would take me away from my other work.

How to notify yourself or other admins about the probes:

1. On the Left column click on event Handlers
2. Select By Action
3. Click on New Event Handler
4. Select which server to notify about
5. Leave the Trigger as default
6. Click on the Event tab
7. LEave events can be any type
8. For the second option, I select events must be one of these severities and pick Fatal, Failure, Warning High it is up to you but at least pick what you selected up above for your mail routing probes.
9. Then select events can have any message, hey you might get lucky and see other built in probes. Neat huh?
10. Select Action tab
11. Method you should select Twitter Mail
12. Enter names or servers or mail-in db for the notices
13. Select when to enable it.
14. Save and Close

And you are done! Cool huh? and none of that wizard stuff. Real admin coolness in under 5 minutes.
Any questions? Speak now so my attendees in Vegas get your knowledge as well as mine.

PS here is what your notification will look like in your email:

Originating Server: Presto/RUSH
Event Severity: Fatal
Event Type: Server
Event Time: 04/13/2011 03:09:13 PM

Lotus Entries
  Probable Cause:
     1. The number of attempts to deliver messages to this destination is
excessive.
     2. The named server may be down.
     3. There may be problems with network connection.
     4. The details tab lists any errors encountered when attempting to
access the destination.
  Possible Solution:
     1. Configure a mail routing probe to quickly detect a nonresponding
server.
     2. Verify that the other server is running.
     3. Check connection documents for the correct information.
     4. Verify that the number of messages required before routing occurs
is less than the configured probe limit.
  Corrective Action:
     1. Create a mail routing probe.
     2. Inspect or modify a Connection document on server 'Presto/RUSH'.


To see additional information about this error message, click here -->
(Document link: Error Message Document)

To see the document that triggered this notification, click here -->
(Document link: Event Notification Document)

DDM once again comes through

For those who still do not use DDM, Domino Domain Monitoring, you really must like working hard.

At MWLUG I presented on this topic, link to my presentation is here. In the room, only about 10% had ever looked at it or even opened it up. A sad commentary on training in my opinion.

I think I covered how to set this up in my presentation linked above.
For a voice over and presentation you can find my LTAP presentation here password was ltap. If you have questions, you know how to find me and I will be at Lotusphere as well.

In any event, if you had set up even some simple events in the events4.nsf database to monitor and notify you of failures, especially internal email routing or via VPN, then good for you.

If not, you would probably wake up to a nightmare of people screaming where is their emails. Instead you get a nice email from your server asking you to check what is wrong.

In this case, it even offered a bunch of reasons as you can see from it's email to me:

Originating Server: Company/corp
Event Severity: Fatal
Event Type: Server
Event Time: 01/10/2011 07:47:36 PM

Lotus Entries
Probable Cause:
1. The number of attempts to deliver messages to this destination is excessive.
2. The named server may be down.
3. There may be problems with network connection.
4. The details tab lists any errors encountered when attempting to access the destination.
Possible Solution:
1. Configure a mail routing probe to quickly detect a nonresponding server.
2. Verify that the other server is running.
3. Check connection documents for the correct information.
4. Verify that the number of messages required before routing occurs is less than the configured probe limit.
Corrective Action:
1. Create a mail routing probe.
2. Inspect or modify a Connection document on server 'name/corp'.

I know this is nothing special to many bloggers, but for those admins that want to learn and do more, it makes you look good to management, or in our case a client.

Be proactive, not reactive, plan ahead.

LTAP session completed on DDM

Finished recording the session today for the LTAP 2010 team.

LTAP is the first VIRTUAL Lotus Technical and Professional users’ conference and it is October 27 and 28.

My session, slightly adjusted from MWLUG, discussing DDM, Domino Domain Monitor for those not into acronyms.

I provide an overview of DDM, it's history, it's ambiguous messages, how to edit them (hint it changed in R8), and left out the practical joke that was included at MWLUG.

This was much easier in person with an audience as it does require quite a bit of interaction so hopefully you will tune in to it and I will be around for a Q and A session afterward or a chat session during it.

My DDM Session at MWLUG

Packed room, about 50 people and one lucky developer who won a Plantronics Voyager!

"If You only If You Only Knew What Your Server Was Saying"

The customization of DDM and how to understand some ambiguous messages.

You can download the file from here.

Last minute MWLUG DDM Session help

If You Only Knew What Your Server Was Saying - INF101 - Thursday 11am-12pm
Abstract: Your server is crying out in pain and you ignore it. Daily, hourly it suffers in silence because you do not let it talk. You know it can talk, right? Then you turn it on and it talks, non stop. So you shut it off again. Let me spend some time on what it is saying to you and understand what is important and how to customize it to make your life better and keep your server and employees happier.

My session on DDM is not exactly a best practices, but more a how to work with it, understand it session for those who either never go inside/under the covers but use it or those who have no idea how to use it

While I have a number of items, I was looking for other issues you have seen or been emailed by the system which are vague or questionable warnings.

Or for that matter anything you wish it told you beforehand?

Just wondering if I am missing anything.

The Customer, however odd, is Always Right

We have all heard about the owner that is paranoid...I have met him. Many times. Multiple times, in fact, CEOs aren't as paranoid as an owner of a private company.

Owners are unique, they have done everything at one time and now as business booms and they get larger, fear for their IP, intellectual property.

Maybe it's a business report, financing, merger details, secret projects but whatever it is, they want it kept secret and away from everyone.

Excellent, that's why they use Lotus Notes and Domino, for it's levels of security.

I was asked to monitor who was attempting to access certain files(email mail boxes and an application) by an owner. No problem, configure DDM, set up specific rules to report ONLY to me, not the normal admins.

Ok, so I get the usual SMTP, network related messages, we cleared it down to just watch for anyone trying to access the files.

Lo and behold, he was right. The owner picked out someone and wanted to be alerted if I received any notifications about them. I did.

So now the question becomes what data do i want to keep for compliance/legal purposes? Copies of the email notifier of course, but logs too?

Another client wanted to ensure absolutely no one could access his email, even if he himself messed it up he did not want me or any admin to fix it. I did not agree that this was a good idea but provided him some guidelines to secure his mail file and encrypt it. I pointed out that my not having "God" access as he called it would create issues for the rest of the employees. We even discussed creating his own server and domain for him alone.

So never question the paranoia or odd requests from owners of businesses because they do know what they are talking about usually.

Calendar Profile "Errors " for Forwarded Email

Not sure why this is an error at all.

Yes, I read technote #1260359 entitled:
Forwarding mail to another address prevents busytime from recording Calendar data

In a mixed environment of Lotus and Non-Lotus users this is a common occurrence. Yes, there are some ways around it, but the simplest way is to just add the forwarding email and let all mail relay internally.

Now, if you enable DDM(Domino Domain Monitoring) which hopefully you do and then set the events you wish to track and be notified about through email, logging, database or whatever way, this will drive you insane.

Every time you start a server these "errors" are generated. In a small group or server you may not care, but with 100's or 1,000's of users this will start causing all kinds of issues. Admins will stop monitoring it, and you can exclude it by being more specific in what notifications you do want to receive.

However, when at a new client, who isn't using DDM, I like to run it and see what I get. Needless to say if email notifications go out you have swamped or crashed a mail router or at least delayed a bunch of important emails.

So I posted this on Ideajam to encourage IBM to adjust this one error accordingly.