Chapter 11: Monitoring Exchange

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Overview

Monitoring is the use of automated processes to continually collect and analyze the operation of critical Exchange services. Monitoring is an important part of delivering a high-quality messaging service and for achieving commitments of Service Level Agreements (SLAs). The overall goal of monitoring is to avoid possible service outages by predicting problems and by quickly noticing problems that cannot be predicted. This can be accomplished by either continually polling the monitored component or by receiving or detecting events from these components.

When the monitoring tool detects a problem, it should automatically alert the Exchange operations staff and should provide immediate information regarding the nature and severity of the problem. Ideally, the monitoring tools also should be able to react to certain detected problems and initiate automatic recovery procedures.

Although Windows and Exchange provide some monitoring tools as part of the standard product set, this is an area where most enterprises choose third-party tools to augment the standard tools. Third-party tools generally provide monitoring capability for more than just Exchange. For example, NetIQ can monitor Exchange, Windows, SQL, Internet Information Server, and other Microsoft BackOffice products. When considering any alternative tools, such as NetIQ AppManager, Microsoft Operations Manager, or HP OpenView for Windows, it is recommended that you review your requirements not only for monitoring the Exchange environment, but also for monitoring the underlying services, such as the operating system.

Monitoring is performed for many different reasons, including:

• Monitoring overall system health

• Monitoring components to detect and predict trends

• Monitoring to detect nondelivery of messages

• Monitoring the backup process

• Monitoring antivirus software

• Monitoring the underlying network

This chapter describes some of the monitoring tasks that should be performed.

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