Monitoring Exchange

[Harold J. Ballinger]

Generally you are at least going to see an error message come across in the MSGS column if something errors/hangs on an Exchange server. Unless you have created blanket ignore rules for the MSGS column or you don't monitor and alert off of the MSGS column, you should have seen something there for 99.9% of all Exchange issues.

There are also ways to test by sending a heartbeat email and checking it via POP3 or IMAP to insure that you receive it. There are ways to insure SMTP is up, specific services are running, etc. The important thing to remember is that monitoring looks at specific components of the system. Just like in your car, you have a gauge that tells you if you are overheated, have gas, etc. but your instrument panel may not give you any indication that there is a problem if you are wedged on top of a median without any wheels touching the ground. Same thing with monitoring. You can monitor specific aspects of the system based on your design, but there is no magic bullet that is going to catch every possible scenario - especially when it comes to the complexities of email routing, etc. 

Was this an issue with misconfiguration, bad patch/update, hardware failure, software crash?

-----Original Message-----
From: Jacobs, Eric [mailto:ejacobs at thomaspublishing.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, October 14, 2009 4:26 PM
To: hobbit at hswn.dk
Subject: [hobbit] Monitoring Exchange

Apparently, last night our Exchange server stopped receiving email until
it was rebooted this morning. Everyone is up in arms. Hobbit showed
nothing unusual. Does anyone have any way to monitor Exchange? 

Eric Jacobs
Infrastructure and Operations
Information Technology Group
Phone:215-682-5354
Email:ejacobs at thomaspublishing.com



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