Building servers and without maintaining them is of no use as you will not get the best performance out of the services that are running. In this scenario building NS servers and maintaining them is key. The question here is how to maintain them. I will try my best to cover all possibilities in this article.

Notification Server Maintenance

We will try to cover maintenance of a database that is holding NS SQL database as well as the NS server.

SQL Database Maintenance

1. Memory management for SQL servers

   Depending upon the versions of the operating system and SQL Server and the amount of memory in the SQL Server, memory management techniques can be used to optimize the memory usage of SQL. These techniques include:

   • 4-gigabyte tuning-/3GB
   • Physical Address Extension-PAE
   • Address Windowing Extensions-AWE

   You need to explore the best possibilities of the above mentioned switches as per your environment

2. Purging plans

   Data retention should also be planned and to keep data at minimal that is required is always recommended to get the best performance from NS SQL database. This is where purging comes into consideration. How to set purging is very simple and can be understood with the help of below screenshot-

   

   Click to view.

   Steps- Under the Configuration tab > Server Settings > Notification Server Settings is a Purging Maintenance task that brings up a web page for configuring these settings.

3. Other plans

   I will recommend more sql plans

   1. Defragging Indexes - How to do it can be found at the end of KB article mentioned earlier.
   2. Regular Backups

NS Server Maintenance

1. NSConfigurator Utility - This great tool can be used for making any changes in coresettings.config file to reduce the chance of corruption.

   Steps - The NSConfigurator utility can be launched by clicking Start > Programs > Altiris > Tools > NSConfigurator

2. Performance monitors through perfmon - The performance hit of Altiris Client Requests can be monitored using the built in Altiris Perfmon counters. The counters that need to be set are -

   Altiris client request/Client request

3. Server Performance Report - The server performance report is an excellent report for monitoring the performance of the Notification Server. It provides detail on SQL processing for Scheduled Tasks, Client Config Requests, Message Processing and Report Execution. Each of these areas can be drilled down into to provide more granular detail. Reviewing these reports frequently can help identify problems.Below are some samples report.
   

   Click to view.

   

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4. Event logs for NS server - The event logs should be viewed frequently to look at warnings and errors. The Log Viewer can also be used to view events in real time
   

   Click to view.

   

   Click to view.

   Tip- Messages appearing in blue are warnings. Messages in red are errors
5. Notification Policies - Notification Policies can be configured to provide automatic notification that problems exist. For example would be to configure a Product License Termination Date Notice notification that will send out an alert when a solution is nearing its termination date.
   

   Click to view.

6. Defrag drives of NS from windows - Fragmentation of the hard drives in the Notification Server will also cause performance issue. The drives in the NS and SQL server should also be defragged regularly. A scheduled task can also be configured to perform this. Below is a sample command line:

   C:\WINDOWS\system32\defrag.exe C: /f /v
   /f - forces defragmentation to run even if free space is low
   /v - provides verbose output
   
   

Best Practices

Best practices can be defined as the most efficient (least amount of effort) and effective (best results) way of accomplishing a task, based on repeatable procedures that have proven themselves over time for large numbers of people. So question comes how to implement in Altiris and here is the answer.

1. Purging plans for database
2. Table retention in SQL database as the historical data is kept in tables and are not purged so separate procedure for table should be kept.
3. Performance reports for NS/SQL database
4. Unwanted tasks with solutions should be deleted
5. Eventlogs in NS server