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.