Why This Chapter Matters

You should monitor Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 services and resources to identify problems before they have an impact on your users. Monitoring also allows you to identify trends that indicate future problems and to plan for future growth. Critical services need to be monitored on a daily basis to ensure they are running properly. Scheduled monitoring allows you to accumulate the data you require for trend analysis and capacity planning. If daily or scheduled monitoring identifies a potential problem, or if a user reports a problem, then on-demand monitoring techniques are used to isolate and to help solve that problem. Both Exchange Server 2003 and Microsoft Windows Server 2003 provide tools to monitor system performance and to repair the problems that the monitoring process identifies. Monitoring is an important part of your work as an administrator and will be tested in the exam.