In a recent post on the NGW List, renowned GroupWise expert Danita Zanrè expressed that she checks her GroupWise agents regularly. Other administrators expressed the same thing.

We have in GroupWise one of THE most reliable systems anywhere but we still need to check. What if an agent isn't running?

Anything can happen.

And so we check and we check and we check. It's a little like picking up the phone every five minutes to see whether there is a call for us. If we had to use the phone that way, we would never get any work done.

What if there was a way that you would not have to keep checking your system?

Let Redline do the work for you. If there is a problem, Redline will alert you. You can configure how, in fact. Redline has its own built-in http server and smtp server, so it does not depend on any systems running on your host.

Redline does more than just monitor GroupWise components. Do you have a Blackberry server? Archive-to-go? GroupWise Mobile Server? Redline covers it!

Let Redline take the load off your mind. If something goes wrong with your GroupWise system, Redline will tell you.

If you don't hear from Redline, all is well!

Here is how to set up notification in Redline:

The first thing you need to do is to decide what it is you want to be notified about. The obvious events are protracted downtime (longer than x minutes - x being what YOU consider to be long), message queues backing up, running out of disk space and such events.

But Redline monitors so many fields, YOU are the one who decides what Redline should be looking and and just what level is OK, what is BAD and the gray areas in between. For some installations, 1000 messages per hour is way too high. For others, 10000 messages per hour is normal traffic.

Once you've decided how much is too much and what you want to be notified on, you need to decide HOW you want to be notified. E-mail? Pager? Cell phone? Who else needs to be notified?

Under Configure, click on Notification. Here you will enter who and how to notify for the five main types of alerts. You can specify up to two e-mail addresses and up to two SMTP servers to use. Redline has its own built in SMTP server so you don't need to rely on GWIA. (what if GWIA is down).... Some pagers and cell phones can be reached by sending an e-mail to your cell phone/pager account.

Then click on Thresholds to set up what you'll get notified on. Choose what agent you're monitoring and within that, you'll see a list of available items to be alerted on.

You'll then edit the value (how much) and what kind of an alert it will be.

For instance, let's say you're concerned with disk space and you want to be alerted, problem level, if you receive more than 1000 messages in an hour.

You would choose "GW Internet Agent" and then "Internet messages IN" - then you'd set the alert level to Problem and you'd put 34 in the 2 minute delta field - (34 messages per 2 minutes is approximately 1000 messages per hour).

Click OK and you'll be alerted.

Follow this same procedure for anything you would like to be notifed on with Redline.

Now you won't have to check GroupWise all the time, just wait for a page.....