September 12th, 2005
Are you using Automatic Diagnostic Collection?
If not, why not? Since Domino
6.0.1, there has been this nifty tool that will collect info every time
your server crashes and send it to a mail-in database. When I first
heard of this, I thought "Cool, that will save time when customers
have to round up this info and mail it to us to diagnose." But
really, its a whole lot more than that.
First, you can use it along with Fault
Recovery to collect all needed diagnostics, automatically restart a server
and notify you that all is now well. This will take care of a lot
of crashes - for instance those caused by a bad email or attachment
- the ones where the server pops right back up after you restart it.
Except with ADC enabled, you'll get the NSD and all relevant information
attached to a document in your mail-in database that you can turn around
and forward to IBM Support. You don't have to wake up in the middle of
the night, run nsd, collect it, ftp it, etc......the server really will
do all of that for you.
Better yet, you can look in the mail
in database and poke around the views and learn some very interesting things.
You can see if the same type problem is occurring over several
servers, or if the same server has had similar crashes. I can think
of several times this would have been handy - like for instance, one customer
that had crashes at almost the exact same time once a week. (turned
out it was the backup software, by the way).
The Domino 6 database views look like
this:
And yes, you can set this up end users too
- you can collect information about end user outages without ever visiting
a desktop and without them knowing it.
I'm blogging this as a series, a trick I
picked up from pal Chris.
I'll cover the new stack analysis in Domino 7, how to set all this
up and limit the space used, etc.
I was talking about ADC with a colleague
last week and mentioned that I think that not too many administrators are
using this. So what I want to know is: Are you using ADC and
if not, why not?
