Domino® domain monitoring (DDM)

Domino® domain monitoring (DDM) provides one location in the Domino® Administrator client that you can use to view the overall status of multiple servers across one or more domains, and then use the information provided by DDM to quickly resolve problems.

DDM does the following:

• Automates problem determination and determines probable cause in multiple feature areas.
• Provides an active monitoring capability utilizing more than 50 new probes with highly-configurable schedules, content and targets.
• Provides a top-down, feature-oriented view of the domain status with the ability to selectively view detailed information on that status.
• Provides visual indicators for displaying which problems are most critical, which are resolved, and which are not.
• Provides default settings for probe configuration to make setup easy.
• Recognizes and reports critical server and client issues within minutes.
• Provides corrective actions and links to databases in order to resolve reported problems.

DDM uses configurable probes to gather information across multiple servers and then consolidates and reports that information on specially-designated collection servers in the Domino® Domain Monitor database (DDM.NSF). A probe is a discrete check, or set of checks, configured to run against one or more servers, databases, and services. The probe returns status and server health information to DDM.NSF. Probes run according to a default schedule, a schedule that you specify, or on an as-needed basis as determined by the probe and the events on the server.

To gather and report information across multiple servers and domains, DDM uses a collection hierarchy consisting of servers that collect information from other servers, and node servers from which the information is collected. All event information is stored and consolidated in the Domino® Domain Monitor that you can view. You specify the collection hierarchy, that is, which servers are collection servers and which are node servers. A collection hierarchy can be multi-tiered with collection servers collecting from other collection servers, but that is not required for DDM to run. As with the DDM probes, the collection hierarchy is easy to create and modify in a configuration user interface in the Monitoring Configuration database (EVENTS4.NSF).

A collection server collects two classes of event information, enhanced events and simple events. When you open an event, the Event document contains a Class type field that indicates whether the event is a simple event or an enhanced event. Enhanced events include events generated by a DDM Probe document, events generated by a Domino® event generator, or any other event with specific target information appearing in the DDM event report. Target information includes servers, databases, agents, or a user-specified target. A simple event is any event that is not associated with or that does not contain specific target information. For example, most of the events that are reported to the Domino® server console are simple events.