Here’s the presentation I did in Belgium at the BLUG event, which was one of the better user conferences I’ve ever attended by the way:
At the request of one of our larger customers, we’ve added a new option to the Alert Definitions. Now you can specify which servers an alert will apply to. For example, you can define an alert for “West Coast Admins” then check off all the servers that group is responsible for. If one of those servers has an issue, the alert will go to them. If a server not on the list has the issue, that particular alert will be skipped.
One of our customers had a near meltdown this weekend. Apparently the AC in the server room malfunctioned on Saturday afternoon resulting in hot air being vented into the server room. Shortly thereafter, the servers got so hot they began automatically shutting down.
Fortunately, the Domino servers were being monitored by VitalSigns, and we got an alert. We attempted to RDP to the servers, but no response. The on-call tech had to go in and see what was up, and he opened the server room to a sauna. We can only imagine how hot it might have been on Monday morning, had this not been detected.
BLUG is off to a great start, with almost 300 attendees and speakers from 10 different countries…
We made an exciting announcement here and I thought I’d share with all of you. It isn’t quite done yet, but we’re using the opportunity of this major show in Europe to announce what’s coming in the latest VitalSigns. See the press release here.
Here’s the jist of it…. The release culminates a year of new features and enhancements based on customer requests and feedback, including:
We are pleased to announce that Alan Forbes, RPR Wyatt Director of Product Development, will be presenting at the Belgium Lotus User Group (BLUG) in Antwerp, March 22nd and 23rd .
Alan will be presenting his latest findings on Maximizing Monitoring for Traveler. If you are going, please be sure to say hello. RPR Wyatt will also be represented at the NotesCode booth.
The upcoming major release of VitalSigns will have dramatically enhanced capabilities for monitoring Lotus Traveler. We’ve already started working on the web page describing it.
Officially, it is called “IBM® Lotus® Notes® Traveler software” but most of us just call it “Traveler”. Traveler provides mobile support for Lotus Notes and Web Access users with automatic, real-time replication of email, calendar, address book, journal, and to-do lists across mobile device platforms – Apple iOS, Google Android 2.x and 3.x, Nokia Symbian and Microsoft Windows Mobile. Frankly, it is just plain cool.
Because Lotus Traveler is so cool, it is crucial to be able to monitor your Lotus Traveler servers. Why? Bbecause as soon as you deploy Traveler, your users are going to be clamoring for it, and usage will explode. Traveler quickly becomes mission critical.
Here’s a link to a video showing off the new features.
Thanks to a suggestion from one of our customers, we’ve added a new feature to the VitalStatus database for browser users. Now as you are looking at Domino server details, there is a new tab called “Web Admin” .
Clicking this tab will launch the web admin client for that server in an iframe within the Web Admin tab. Of course, you have to be authorized to use web admin for this to work, as we never bypass Domino security.
Here’s a screenshot to give you the idea.
In preparation for presenting at the Belux Lotus User Group next month on Best Practices for Rolling out Lotus Traveler, I came across a neat tip I thought I’d share. It lets you put a company logo on the Lotus Traveler home page on your Traveler server.
1. Go to traveler server data directory (\domino\html\traveler\Images)
2. Rename banner.jpg to Ibmbanner.jpg
3. Copy your company logo and rename to banner.jpg
4. Restart HTTP task or restart traveler server
One of our customers, who shall remain nameless, was under some pressure to cut “non-essentials” from his budget. Sound familiar?
So he reluctantly cut his monthly “RAPScan” agreement with us. For those who don’t know, RAPScan is a service whereby we install VitalSigns at customer site and the alerts go to us to take care of whatever the problem is. (Alerts go to the customer too if they want them, as most do.)
Less than two weeks later, a number of servers went down, and one stopped routing mail. Users noticed. Without VitalSigns, our stretched-thin admin was one of the last to know. He got unfairly beat up for it, even though he told his managers that was the risk.
Bottom line: He got (expedited) budget approval to buy his own licenses of VitalSigns, and we’re reinstalling VS at his site later today.
We improved the Cluster Health tab. The quickest way to see these improvements is to watch a short shockwave demo . (No, it doesn’t have sound).
There are two big improvements.
1) Now the cluster names are color-coded so you can see at a glance which clusters have issues, just as the disk health is color-coded.
2) The other big improvement is that in addition to just seeing the current values of the cluster, we made it super simple to see how the cluster replicator has been performing over the course of the day simply by clicking on the server name. You could graph this information before, using the graph tab, but this is better we think.
Special thanks to Andy Pedisich’s Lotusphere presentation for pointing out that the trend is as important as the current values. He presented a manual way to get the type of information that VitalSigns gets automatically by using a modified statrep.nsf and Excel, which was pretty slick.
One interesting tidbit is that he mentioned was that in the course of his consulting he regularly encounters cluster servers that behind, and one was sometimes up to 90 minutes behind in the middle of the day, and without looking at these key metrics (which VitalSigns makes easy) most administrators don’t even know they have a problem until it is too late! One server crashes, the users fail over, and they ask “where did my last hour of work go?”
Thanks for a great presentation, Andy!
