Exactly one year ago, IBM Notes/Domino 9 was released. Along with the name change, Notes and Domino 9 is software in the age of Social Collaboration. Looking beyond the nice front-end features of a Notes 9 Client, you’ll find some very interesting stuff on the Backend Domino Server as well.
One of the interesting things of a Domino Server is its Statistics. While I’ll admit to being a statistics geek, it is a major reason I pay close attention, especially when there is a new major release involved.
Sure enough, if you were to compare a list of server statistics between IBM Domino 8.5 and IBM Domino 9, you would see a bunch of new statistics names, although so far, IBM has published very little about this.
Database.NSF.CriticalNABViewsUnavail.Current is, in my opinion, one of the coolest new statistics, which covers the two most critical views in a Domino Directory, which are $ServerAccess and $User. If the Domino Server reports that the $ServerAccess and/or $User is being rebuilt and therefore not available, and a new user tries to authenticate against the Server, the user will failover to its cluster mate. Already existing authenticated users, however, may continue to access the server.
Database.NSF.CriticalNABViewsUnavail.Total on the other hand will give you the total number of critical Domino Directory views, which were unavailable since the server was started.
IBM then goes one step further as they provide the ability to monitor critical views of your very own Domino apps. Fantastic, right?!
The name of this statistic is called Database.NSF.CriticalViewsUnavail.Current.
You can easily define your critical views via a simple Updall parameter, shown below. So if you have a central application and a critical view being rebuild when a user attempts to access this database, a fail over to another replica will occur.
The Updall string you’re looking for is:
Options:
| A | B |
| -T+ “name” | Special view named “viewname” is a critical view |
| -T- “name” | Special view named “viewname” is not a critical view |
For example:
Load updall crm.nsf –T+ Accounts
After doing this, the Accounts view in the CRM application is now considered as a critical view by Domino.
Looking at other new statistics, you will find more under Database.NAB.ViewRead.* and Database.NSF.Profile.*.
The Database.NSF.Profile.NotesSizeCurrent tells you the total size of all profile documents you have in your environment, giving you a great way to monitor profile doc growth patterns.
Of course, the main question with stats is always “how do I use this new information in my daily operations” and when it comes to gathering this info in a meaningful way, you can certainly use out of the box tools of domino such as statrep.nsf.
However, if you like to combine meaningful statistics with a monitoring tool, you also get the advantage of setting up alerts around threshholds. Visualizing this data in graphs and charting it historically is also possible and clearly shows how the IBM Domino Server performs and what your normal and abnormal usage patterns looks like.
Our way of combining statistics, monitoring, visualizing and optimizing is called GreenLight and if you’re interested in finding out more, drop us a line here.
Here a quick example of what such visualization with GreenLight can look like:
Enjoy the new Statistics and we look forward to your feedback!
