Once your probes are enabled, they can do two things: trigger a Domino event if the target resource doesn't respond within a given threshold, or maintain a statistic for the response time of the monitored resource.

In this article I will look at how to set up and configure probes to monitor your Domino server resources and then cover the new statistics that are produced by these probes.

Setting up probes
Probes are created within the Statistics and Events database (EVENTS4.NSF) on your Domino server. You can create probes that can check for the ability to do the following:

• Access a Domino server and optionally open a specific database;
• Send mail to a recipient on another Domino server or send mail on the same server using a dedicated mail-in database called ISpy);
• Access Web resources DNS, FTP, HTTP, IMAP, LDAP, NNTP, POP3, or SMTP) on a server.

You will need to add RunJava ISpy to the ServerTasks= line in NOTES.INI for the monitoring server. Probes use Java code to do their work, and you need this statement to load the correct classes necessary to do the probing. A quick tip--since Java class names are case-sensitive, you need to make sure you type the name of the class (ISpy) in this format; otherwise, it will not work, and the error messages unfortunately won't tell you what has gone wrong! You also need to ensure that you're running the Events task on the Domino server for the event notification to work. Check that it's listed in the ServerTasks= line and add it if needed.

Figure A shows a probe being created.

FIGURE A

Here you see a probe being created. Click picture for a larger image.

There is a Probe Wizard available in the database; however, I have found it's just as simple to select Probe from the Create menu and then select the type of probe to be created (Domino Server, Mail, or TCP Server). I can then create and save the document directly. The fields on the document are pretty much self-explanatory. After selecting what server(s) you wish to probe, you can configure both the timeout and how often you wish the probe to be tested. The server probe does not allow you to configure the send interval for the probe. It runs every 15 minutes. On the Other tab of the probe document, you can disable that probe if necessary, so you can temporarily stop that probe without having to delete it and recreate it later.