Daniel Nashed's Blog

Leveraging Domino Event Monitoring for Domino V12 CertMgr Health Checks

Domino events, event monitoring and DDM

Events and event monitoring have been in the product I think since version 4.5.
Domino 7 introduced Domino Domain Monitoring (DDM) which leverages the existing infrastructure and is extending it.
The foundation of event monitoring is a core component of Domino and it leverages another important core component "Domino statistics".

Error messages and statistics are listed in events4.nsf with their error messages, sub-system severity etc and can be customized.
Most of the statistics are also listed in events4.nsf to be selectable for statistic based event monitoring.

Once a statistic event is generated it can be either logged and correlated in DDM.
Or you can define event handlers (a functionality that is in the code since the beginning of event monitoring and often forgotten) for different type of operations.

For example:

• Send mail
• Log to statrep.nsf
• Log to windows system log / Unix syslog
• SNMP trap

So let me take a new functionality in Domino V12 for which I just looked into it again when updating my production server.


CertMgr health check and statistics

CertMgr Health check by default runs every 30 minutes and checks the certificate status for each TLS Credentials document.
The Health check is also embedded in the certificate import or ACME flow operation and will show certificate warnings and a green/yellow/red status.

In addition it provides the following 5 Statistics.

[ By the way any C-API developer can leverage the same functionality and generate own statistic counters.
And I have seen that business partners also wrote helper applications to allow to use this functionality from other languages. ]


COMMAND SENT: show stat certmgr.*
  CertMgr.CertStatus = Yellow
  CertMgr.CertStatus.Green = 4
  CertMgr.CertStatus.Red = 0
  CertMgr.CertStatus.Yellow = 1
  CertMgr.Status = Yellow
  5 statistics found

The counters can be used with a threshold to generate mails or log events as mentioned.

This results into log messages like this:





Adding new statistics to events4.nsf


The statistic values haven't been added to the events4.nsf.
But they are open for any admin to add.

I created two new documents (see yellow status below).














Once you introduced the static (would also work with any business partner application statistic), you can leverage the statistic to trigger statistic events.






Once created you can set an event monitor on this event .
A wizard in the statistic even document can help to set it up just for this event.
Or you can have a more general event configuration based on sub-systems and severity





You see in the above example that I also added another event handler for writing events to the system log.
This could be used today already with Splunk and other monitoring systems to capture important events.

Domino Event Monitoring and DDM are hidden gems in the Domino universe.
They have been around for such a long time and have not been updated, because they just do what they should.

I did a 2 days NSD & Diagnostic workshop in 2013... Most of the material is still relevant beside the improvements since then.

There is a lot of diagnostic information in Notes an Domino which has been outstanding at the time introduced.
And they are still much better than what I see in many other applications.


-- Daniel

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