Best practice for monitoring email server?

All replies

• 

  

  0

  Sign in to vote

  Hi,

  you are able to use NAGIOS but you have to configure the tests by yourself. There is no testpackage out there for Exchange 2010. If using System Center Configuration Manager from Migrosoft you are able to monitoryour Exchange Server. A management Pack in order to monitor an Exchangeserrver out of the box is available for no additional fee.

  ---

  regards Thomas Paetzold visit my blog on: http://sus42.wordpress.com

  Wednesday, May 23, 2012 8:32 PM
• 

  

  0

  Sign in to vote

  Thanks. What types of monitors does NAGIOS do for email because i already pay for Quest PacketTrap which does the rest of my network monitoring? PacketTrap works good but not great for email server monitoring. Could NAGIOS do round-trip?

  ---

  Elliot

  Wednesday, May 23, 2012 8:50 PM
• 

  

  0

  Sign in to vote

  NAGIOS itsself only do basic monitoring. Each Exchange performance counter you want to monitor you have to write a script which is polled by the NAGIOS Server.

  If you need an example you will find a script which will monitor the status of a mailboxdatabase in my blog: http://sus42.wordpress.com/tag/monitoring/

  ---

  regards Thomas Paetzold visit my blog on: http://sus42.wordpress.com

  Wednesday, May 23, 2012 9:32 PM
• 

  

  0

  Sign in to vote

  Not sure if that's really what i'm looking for but ill look into it. Think round-trip monitors are the most effective for monitoring email servers. Just looking for the right one...

  ---

  Elliot

  Thursday, May 24, 2012 4:34 PM
• 

  

  0

  Sign in to vote

  have you looked into opnet

  Thursday, May 24, 2012 6:58 PM
• 

  

  0

  Sign in to vote

  Never heard of them but dont see anything related to round-trip monitor. I found a few but haven't tried them out yet. Ones i found are mailive, mxalerts, and websitepulse. Most of these have some kind of free trial or limited account, ill give them a try. 

  ---

  Elliot

  Thursday, May 24, 2012 7:13 PM
• 

  

  0

  Sign in to vote

  Hi ,

  You can try to SCOM to monitor Exchange mail flow.

  The detail information for your reference.

  Monitoring Exchange 2010 with OpsMgr 2007 R2 (Part 1):

  http://www.msexchange.org/articles_tutorials/exchange-server-2010/management-administration/monitoring-exchange-2010-opsmgr-2007-r2-part1.html

  RPC Latency:<//span>

  http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/operationsmanagergeneral/thread/3e2d761c-90e4-4b2e-896d-b71d8d556dea

  You can also enable Exchange message track to check mail flow.

  Configure Message Tracking

  http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa997984.aspx

  ---

  Wendy Liu

  TechNet Community Support

  

  
  

  • Edited by wendy_liuModerator Friday, May 25, 2012 6:49 AM

  Friday, May 25, 2012 6:48 AM

  Moderator
• 

  

  0

  Sign in to vote

  Thanks Wendy. So far I'm testing out mxalerts and it seems pretty good and it was pretty simple setup.

  ---

  Elliot

  • Proposed as answer by wendy_liuModerator Monday, May 28, 2012 9:11 AM
  • Marked as answer by wendy_liuModerator Thursday, May 31, 2012 2:52 AM

  Friday, May 25, 2012 2:10 PM
• 

  

  0

  Sign in to vote

  most stats are perf mon stats so they can be pulled in nagios pretty easy.

  define command{
  command_name ex-db-read-latency
  command_line $USER1$/check_nt -H $HOSTADDRESS$ -p 12489 -v COUNTER -d SHOWALL -l "\MSExchange Database\I/O Database Reads (Attached) Average Latency","%.f" -w 50 -c 100
  }
  

  as an example

  I use a combo of these, IIS monitors, event log checks, datastore/log file checks, mail flow send and receive checks but my favorite of all is powershell checks to look for replication issues which are callable via NRPE client.  

  Nagios configuration is not turn key, but if you get the right resources it can be very customized and relevant. 

  Tuesday, July 3, 2012 10:43 PM