Monitoring Domino Backups and business applications
Vladislav Tatarincev 2 March 2026 12:22:38
While ago I came across Daniel Nashed Blog post about Domino Backup central Logging. https://blog.nashcom.de/nashcomblog.nsf/dx/domino-backup-notifications-and-central-logging.htm?opendocument
Domino backup has smart design, and Domino Backup reports errors to specific Domino document as well as every databases has date and time of last backup.
Can we monitor these errors? Of course we can and should monitor these errors when they appear.
Is monitoring only errors is sufficient to monitor? Errors in Domino Backup logs is one part of story, but if the databases has been really copied by backup, that is another story.
CYONE CYMON monitoring can monitor not only Domino platform but also any Domino application. Since filename of Domino backup is know "dominobackup.nsf" I created 3 checks for monitoring.
First check we will read how many databases are in Domino backup inventory. For that we will use simple
Select Form="DatabaseBackup" formula. This will return number of databases. CYMON understands same syntax as Domino Designer.
Second check will be a bit more advanced, it will show us number of databases, that has been backuped last 24 hours.
Everytime Domino dabase is under backup with Domino Backup process, it updates LastBackupTime.
This allows us to create @Formula, that can track if this value in not too old, not more than 24h. Non of us, when we need a backup, would like to realise that they took place last time year ago.
CYMON monitoring uses OpenSource ZABBIX, so many of you are familiar with Interface. CYMON is basically a small Notes client that any monitoring can talk to over HTTP. Give me this statistic, or give me this formula.
When everything works, number databases on server(total), and databases in backup should be same. Numbers should match.
If they differ for 1% this should be investigated, if more than X something is not good.
3rd Check.
And one more, we need to analyse if there are errors in Domino backup log files.
In CYMON www.cyone.eu/CYMON there are close to 1000 checks and these checks and charts are split across different dashboards, like Performance, Users, Traveler, Security, Mail, Databases, HTTP and others.
In "04.Databases and Space" Grafana dashboard there is now new backup charts. Since backups occur once per day, it is normal to check this information also once per day, for example 6am, so the load on server will be minimal.
Again, since CYMON acts as a Notes client, so nothing need to be installed on top of Domino server. This gives ability to monitor Domino on any existing supported platform (Linux, Windows, AIX, AS400).
On top of 3 statistics that we created (Total, NumberBackupedLast24H, and ErrorsCount) we should create a trigger, that will alert admin. But this is another story. Trigger can be different, If there are Errors in Logs >0, or if number databases on server, does not match number in backup.
With these simple but efficient @Formulas we can detect issues in system databases like backup. Same approach can be used for any other business applications. For example, New claim from customer older than 1 hour and not assigned to anyone.
CYMON Domino monitoring turns thousands of statistics in valuable information, and Alert when needed. There is no sense to check it manually on server by human. In average Domino has 6000 statistics that change every moment, this will give us 8 millions statistics per day.
This is why it make sense to automate key statistic monitoring with CYMON.
Domino run your business, with same approach like we check backup, we can check logs of synchronisation agents or any other integrations.
CYMON is docker based, requires a Linux machine and initial setup is around 10 min. Free and commercial Versions are available https://www.cyone.eu/CYMON/
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