An Admin Present You Didn't Know You Needed

 Hi, welcome back to my burnt out blog. 1,500 posts and, well, I am kind of burnt out, but that doesn't stop me from giving to the community these little bits.

I'd like to write more but a lot of things have been internal client items that I can't write about, but I am active.

Preamble, excuses out of the way, so, who wants some goodies?

About 2 weeks ago, I gave an impromptu webinar for Openntf.org as a last-minute fill-in.

Openntf, for those that don't know, is the Notes/Domino+ community, where devs, admins, business people, HCL, and others share code and ideas, templates, and projects for the benefit of the greater worldwide community.

I wanted to inform people that monitoring Tasks in the Administrator client has some changes.

Why is this important? Because unless you are a 1 server company, you have a lot of information to remember, such as:

1. How do you know if DBMT ran? 
2. How do you know which server Certmgr runs on?
3. Which web server do you run the Domino REST API on?
4. Which server handles your Backups and Restores, presuming you leverage the v14 options?
   
5. Is NOMAD running?
   
6. Is your DirSync working?
   
7. Are you sure the awesome OnTime Group calendar is running?
8. Have you enabled Aautoupdate yet? One look and you know.

Intriguing questions, right?

Between v9 and v12, nothing changed in the tasks that could be monitored. Traveler seems to have been the last item added, and that was from 8.5, but it found its way into the Monitoring Dashboard in v9.

Now comes v14 and HCl has cleared out some older items, like x500 info and the Fax server....but did not add any of the newer tasks that have come along since v9.

To be fair to HCL, it is not as simple as a few fields and renaming a file.

But fear not my fellow Admins, for I have not only explained it all in my presentation, which you can watch over here on the Openntf YouTube page, I have made the tasks available for everyone to update their Admin Monitoring Dashboard.

If you just want the slides, go here.

And because I know you are probably as lazy as I am, I have made the forms available with instructions to help you get more from your Monitoring Dashboard.

Go get the tasks from my Openntf project over here.

If I missed a task that is not listed, let me know, and I will update the project database.

SnTT - Adding a 3rd party Task to the Domino Admin Client Monitoring Dashboard

 

This has bugged me for a while. I may have just been a bit lazy as well.

But that's what friends are for, and Ted Hardenburgh came to my rescue in our Openntf slack channel.

You can join the slack channel here: https://openntf.slack.com if you have FOMO or just want to ask us your crazy questions.

Anyway, back to Ted's help with my situation.

We have a client running a task that is not a native Domino task, and I wanted to monitor it from the Admin client's Server-Monitoring tab that acts as a Dashboard.

You did know you have a dashboard built into the Admin client, right?

I will presume you know how to add your servers to the dashboard.

But when you want to add a task, you select a server and right-click and select Monitor New Task from the list shown. The default only includes the native Domino tasks.

Naturally, I figured there must be a way to add the 3rd party task, I was hoping without too much under the cover messing around, and that is when Ted helped me out.

My thought was there is a subform someplace to edit, and Ted pointed me to it.

Open the domadmin.nsf file in the Designer client.

Look at the Forms, and you will see a long list of Task\names.

The easiest way to start on this journey is to copy one of the tasks and paste it back in and begin editing it.

In this case, I am creating a task for bccdbt, I already renamed the task.

The name has to match the task name you would run when at a server console.

The fields you will need to edit from the above screen are the following:

Task name, Task filename, and Task Monitor Name and Description.

Task name field = Name as you want it to be seen in the Add Monitor Task pop-up window.

Task filename = the task name as you would enter it in the server console to run it.

Task Monitor Name = Should be how the task is described when you run a sh ta command. Like Router, Schedule Manager, etc...

Description = Edit according to what you need to tell your fellow admins.

Save it and then test it.

The task should show up within a few minutes, the dashboard updates automatically.

That's it. Many thanks again to Ted.

SnTT - How to Stop a Domino Task/App using a Program Document

Here is something that I had no idea about.

In fact, I even opened an aha request to solve this.

Luckily someone else looked deeper into it than I did and found the answer.

I asked around but no one had an answer so here we go.

We all know we can create Program Documents to run tasks, but do you know how to stop the tasks?

A client had a 3rd party application that we had some issues with recently.

While waiting to get a fix or better understanding of the problem, we wanted to only run the tool during certain business hours to prevent the server from crashing as it had been doing every night around midnight.

But I could not figure out how to create a Program Document to stop the process.

Turns out Mike, one of their developers, had the same thoughts but being a developer had some ideas I did not think about. He gets all the credit, but we all get the benefit.

Turns out you want to enter the details as shown::

Maybe if the app/task has switches built-in, you can use them, like q, -q but in this case, we didn't have these options. 

Not everything in life has to be so difficult, nor requires a large blog post.