52 E-Mail NNTP Outbound Server

52.1.1 Message Transmission Error Rate (Messages/minute)

This metric indicates the rate of errors in the news feed. Errors include network outages, misconfigured peer details, host connection failures, and so on. This rate should ideally be zero or very low.

Metric Summary

The following table shows how often the metric's value is collected.

User Action

Sustained high values for this metric usually indicate that there are problems with the quality of network connections between the Oracle Email system and the news peer servers. For example, a slow network is causing the peer to timeout and close connections. Check the following:

1. Check to see if sufficient network resources are available and that peer servers are functioning normally.

2. Check the NNTP Outbound Server log files to see what kind of errors, if any, have been noted by the server. Use esd_logscan.pl to scan the server log files.

52.1.2 Message Transmission Rate (Messages/minute)

This metric indicates the rate at which news messages are being fed to all NNTP peer servers configured to receive feed.

Metric Summary

The following table shows how often the metric's value is collected.

User Action

This metric must be interpreted in conjunction with the Newsfeed Queue metric of the Oracle Collaboration Suite Database (mailstore) target. If the List Queue is also empty or near empty, this is an indication that there are very few messages being fed to peers and this is normal. If the Newsfeed Queue is long but the Message processing rate is low, then users will experience delays in receiving responses to messages posted to newsgroups. Check the following:

1. First, use the monitoring tools available on your operating system (for example, sar, and top) to verify there are sufficient operating system resources.

2. Next, check to see if the network connection between your system and peer servers are congested.

3. If operating system resources are available and the network is not congested, check the NNTP Outbound Server log files for any errors in accessing the Oracle directory server and/or the Oracle Collaboration Suite Database. Use esd_logscan.pl to scan the server log files.

52.1.3 Message Transmission Refusal Rate (Messages/minute)

This metric indicates the number of messages that were offered to a peer, but were refused because the peer had already received it from another server. It is normal for this metric to be non-zero. Sustained high values could mean that the remote peers are receiving feeds from other servers and probably are not required to be fed from the Oracle Email system.

Metric Summary

The following table shows how often the metric's value is collected.

User Action

Message refusal is not considered an error and merely indicates that the peer already has the message or does not want it for some reason, such as spam check failures. Sustained high values for this metric indicate that peer servers are receiving news messages from other news server before the Oracle Email system can propagate them. This is applicable only to messages that are passing through the system.

52.2.1 Connection Cache Hit Ratio (Hits / (Hits + Misses ))

This metric details the efficiency with which network connections are opened to peer servers. For systems with high Message Transfer Rates, this metric should be close to 1. Low values for this metric do not necessarily indicate a problem.

Metric Summary

The following table shows how often the metric's value is collected.

User Action

This metric can be used to tune the connection cache parameter of the NNTP Outbound Server. Adjust the number of connections in the cache and the timeout value of the connections so that this metric is always close to 1.0. However, if the outbound feed traffic is very low in your system, as indicated by the Message Transmission Rate, it is usually more efficient to keep this metric at zero by setting the number of cached connections to zero.

52.3.1 Status

This metric provides information about the Up/Down status of the NNTP Outbound Server and alerts you when the status is down. The NNTP Outbound Server shows a status of Down when all processes on the host are down.

Metric Summary

The following table shows how often the metric's value is collected and compared against the default thresholds. The Consecutive Number of Occurrences Preceding Notification column indicates the consecutive number of times the comparison against thresholds should hold TRUE before an alert is generated.

User Action

You can restart the NNTP Outbound Server by selecting the target and clicking the Restart button on the Email Application home page. To investigate why the service is down, check for alerts that may have been generated. If the NNTP Outbound Server does not restart, the likely cause is that the server cannot connect to at least one of the Oracle Collaboration Suite Databases (mailstores) or to the Oracle directory server.