Exchange Performance Tools

Over the past few years, the Exchange team at Microsoft has been busy releasing tools to help Exchange administrators tune their systems and follow best practices. Microsoft recently released some new tools so I figured it would be a good time to summarize all of these. They can all be found on the Exchange 2003 Tools page.

The most popular of these tools is the Microsoft Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer Tool. The ExBPA analyzes dozens of configuration settings for each Exchange server in your organization and provides a report of possible problems and recommendations for improving your Exchange organization.

The Microsoft Exchange Server Performance Troubleshooting Analyzer tool analyzes memory, disk, and other components of your Exchange server and provides recommendations for solving performance problems.

The Microsoft Exchange Server User Monitor (a.k.a. ExMon) gathers data about Outlook clients in real-time including client usage patterns, client versions, and CPU usage that each client generates.

The Microsoft Exchange Server Profile Analyzer is used to collect estimated statistical information from a single mailbox store or across an Exchange Server organization. The collected data can be used for such tasks as analyzing the performance and health of a server that has mailboxes, improving capacity planning models, and improving testing methodologies and tools.