Monitoring

and
troubleshooting
in Exchange.

Monitoring in Exchange.
In general, the best way to get any
information on problems regarding your
Exchange servers is to implement a good
infrastructure of monitoring.

Exchange server itself provides a great set

of tools for monitoring. You have to configure
what indicators (servers, connectors, etc.)
you want to monitor in the properties of your
Exchange server in Exchange System
Manager on the monitoring tab.

The Monitoring and Status feature has two distinct

user interfaces:
-Notifications. This interface is used for setting
up e-mail alerts or script triggers when a warning
or critical state is reached on any of your
computers.
-Status. This interface is used for configuring
warning and critical states for Simple Mail
Transfer Protocol (SMTP) and X.400 queues,
available virtual memory, CPU activity, and free
hard disk space .

You can configure Exchange to constantly

monitor the performance levels of an array
of network and application services.

Levels for both warning states and critical

states can be established, so that problems
are announced and can be dealt with as
they occur.

Steps to configure a Server for

monitoring:
-Select/configure the resources to monitor.
To do so, open the Exchange System Manager SnapIn and select
the appropriate Server object in the Servers container.
There are many Resources available for monitoring. You can add
the following Resources:

Available Virtual Memory

CPU Utilization
Free disk space
SMTP queue growth
Windows 2003 Service
X.400 queue growth

-Change the state for the selected

services.

For many Services you can change the state to

Critical and Warning when the service is not
running.
In large environments you can define e-Mail
notifications for the 1st level support staff for
services which are in Warning state and
define e-Mail notifications for 2nd level support
staff when the services are in Critical state.

-Configure an E-Mail notification for the

recipients of the Warning and Critical
state conditions.

In the To field select a recipient for the

notifications.
In the E-Mail Server field you have to specify
the E-Mail Sever for sending the notifications.

-When one or more of the configured resources

run into a Critical or Warning state you receive
a E-Mail with a error message with the server
name in the subject line and the condition of the
resource / service in the E-Mail body.

It is important to consider when the monitored

Server is the same Server as the monitoring
Server you can run into trouble because which
Server can send you an E-Mail notification when it
is in an critical state and is unable to send EMails.

In large environments I recommend creating a

dedicated monitoring Server only for monitoring
purposes.

Troubleshooting Assistant.

The Exchange Troubleshooting Assistant programmatically

executes a set of troubleshooting steps to identify the root
cause of performance, mail flow, and database mounting
issues.
The tool automatically determines what set of data is
required to troubleshoot the identified symptoms and collects
configuration data, performance counters, event logs and
live tracing information from an Exchange server and other
appropriate sources.

-It is important that you use the correct version for your version
of Exchange. Using the Exchange 2003 tool against Exchange
2010 is going to give you false results.

The assistant is composed of four

tools:

-Performance Troubleshooter
-Mail Flow Troubleshooter
-Database Troubleshooter
-Exchange processes are failing

-Performance Troubleshooter
Use this tool to troubleshoot the following situations:
-A mailbox or public folder server is experiencing
performance problems.
-Users report that specific actions cause Microsoft
Outlook to stop responding (hang).
-For some users, the remote procedure call (RPC)
Cancel Request dialog box is displayed.
-You suspect that the Exchange server is
experiencing an unusually high RPC load.

-Mail Flow Troubleshooter

It is designed to identify the root cause of detected
symptoms so that you can take a right course of corrective
actions quickly.
The mail flow troubleshooter can identify common root
causes such as:
-Messages backing up in remote delivery queues due to
bad DNS configuration or unintentional third party
software settings.
-Messages backing up in the Messages awaiting directory
lookup queue due to heavy distribution group expansions
or permissions inheritance blocks.
-Messages can not be received from the Internet due to
metabase corruption.

-Database Troubleshooter
-The Database Troubleshooter analyzes an
Exchange mailbox or public folder database and
any available associated transaction log files to
provide guidance on recovery feasibility and
recommendations.
-This tool can be used to identify missing or
corrupted log files and so solves mount problems.

-Exchange processes are failing

- This tool helps you locate and diagnose
problem process.
-It can scan an Exchange server (or pulls the
Exchange topology from Active Directory for the
administrator to select servers to scan) and report
on failure events. This provides a centralized
means of viewing problems for all Exchange
servers in an organization.