That said, rather than trying to sell you on our product, which is what we normally do, in this article I'll subject the new R7 DDM features to as objective analysis as I can. After all, we've been watching this product very carefully for a very long time, and while we like some of what Lotus has done, some is, in my opinion, smoke and mirrors.

With all the marketing activity that surrounds the Domino Domain Monitoring (DDM) feature that's been be introduced with Domino 7, savvy Notes Administrators are already asking, "How much of this is really new?" After all, those of us who have been around a while have heard this before -- IBM announced the "state of the art monitoring tool" for Notes in R4, R5 and again in R6.

Prior claims
Prior to the announcement of DDM, at least nine other solutions have been announced that claimed to provide the ultimate solution for Notes monitoring. For instance, Art Thomas, then of Iris Associates, wrote of R5, "Our biggest goal is to make administration of Domino domains a lot easier, and to reduce the overall cost of management for the customer. This is easily the biggest set of administration enhancements to Domino and Notes of any release to date." See http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/library/ls-Art_Thomas/index.html for the full piece.

The IBM Redbook abstract for Tivoli Manager states, "Tivoli Manager for Domino V2.1 is the new, state-of-the-art management solution for the Lotus Domino environment." You can read this at http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/SG246005.html?Open.

OK, you get the idea.

Here's a list of nine IBM/Lotus products or utilities that we at GSX have identified as being used to monitor Lotus Notes:

• Domino server monitor (Notes Admin client)
• Tivoli Analyzer
• Tivoli Manager for Domino
• Tivoli Monitoring for Messaging and Collaboration
• Domino Domain Monitoring (former Events4 Probes)
• IntelliWatch Pinnacle (former Candle IntelliWatch product)
• Stats, Events, Collector, Reporter, Mail Tracker Collector, iSpy tasks
• Probes and Monitors in statrep.nsf and events4.nsf
• Various results databases such as MailTracker Store, Dommon.nsf or statmail.nsf