Friday, August 25, 2006

Exchange monitoring - The hit list

I am teaching an Exchange 2003 class this week. Today and yesterday, I facilitated a discussion with my students about what they thought was the top items that should be monitored (based partly on our dicussions of monitoring and disaster recovery/prevention). It was an interesting and relevant list and I wanted to post it here for further discussions.

The question essentially was, "independent of a specific monitoring system, what would you want to check, monitor, or identify on your Exchange servers?"
  • Backup related status
    - Did it run successfully? Backup errors?
    - Did transaction logs purge?
    - How long did backups take?
    - Did you back up databases you expected to back up?
  • Check disk space
    - Disk space above warning threshold
    - Disk space growth over time (weekly / monthly)
  • Database (edb and stm) file size growth (weekly / monthly)
  • Queue status / growth (internal and external)
  • Anti-virus system
    - Signatures updated
    - Virus trends (unusual spikes in activity)
  • Online maintenance completion
  • Information store service responding
  • OWA / Web service responding
  • SMTP service responding
  • Test message / measure round-trip times (internal and external)
  • Protocol log file sizes and trends
  • Scan Application logs for common, critical errors:
    - Database / ESE errors (e.g. -1018 errors)
    - Active Directory / DSAccess related errors
  • Critical performance monitor counters:
    - RPC latency
    - Average % disk time
    - CPU usage
    - Available memory within norms
    - Page file usage within norms
  • Physical server / hardware statistics
    - Power supplies functioning
    - Memory / single bit errors
    - Disk / array failures
    - RAID array battery status
    - Temperature alarms
    - Tamper alarms
  • External DNS health (able to resolve external DNS names and our public MX and A records are correct
  • Internal DNS health (resolve internal domain and domain controller resources)
  • Internal network health check (perform network check and compare baseline TTLs)
  • Cluster service responding
  • Cluster virtual servers residing on "home" node as expected
  • Daily administration tasks (who has made Exchange related configuration changes)

posted by Jim McBee @ 4:52 PM   1 comments

1 Comments:

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