Exchange 2003 Resource Monitoring

 Exchange 2003 Standard and Enterprise offers the feature to monitor the Server status of the Exchange Servers. If some of the monitored services and other Resources (RAM, CPU, Services) are in “Warning State” or “Critical State” we can receive a status e-mail or a customized action provided by a script notification can be run. This article explains in detailed steps how to configure Monitoring and E-Mail notification.

In the first step we have to configure a Server for monitoring and select/configure the resources to monitor. To do so, open the Exchange System Manager Snap-In and select the appropriate Server object in the Servers container.

Right-click the Server object and open the Properties for it.

Once the Properties dialog box is open, select the Monitoring tab as shown above.

There are many resources available for monitoring. We can add the following resources:

• Available Virtual Memory
• CPU Utilization
• Free disk space
• SMTP queue growth
• Windows 2003 Service
• X.400 queue growth

Many other 3rd party monitoring tools like Nagios can do most of the monitoring and so we will only add the two most critical items which are not monitored by Nagios. These are:

• Available Virtual Memory
• SMTP queue growth 

In the first step, we will add the Available Virtual Memory instance. Click on the Add button under Monitoring tab. A dialog box similar to the one shown below will open.

Select the Available Virtual Memory from the list and click on OK.

Configuring virtual memory monitoring is very similar to configuring CPU utilization monitoring. We have skipped the CPU Utilization Monitoring. Set the duration to 5 minutes, the warning threshold to 15% and the critical threshold to 10% for Available Virtual Memory. Once the values are set, click on OK.

Follow the process for adding another instance and select SMTP Queue Growth this time from the list.

If SMTP queues start backing up, it often indicates that there is a major problem. It shows that message transport has failed, the Internet connection has failed, or someone is using the server to send spam. In any event, we need to know that there is a problem.

We must input a warning and a critical state threshold value, but these values are entered in minutes. The idea is that we must tell Exchange how many minutes the queue should be constantly growing for before we generate a warning or a critical state message. We can use any values that we want, but I recommend setting the warning threshold at 10 minutes and the critical state threshold at 15 minutes.

Close the dialog boxes and the Properties once done. The next step is to configure an E-Mail notification for the recipients of the “Warning” and “Critical” state conditions. To do so, open the Notifications object under Tools.

Click on New and select E-mail Notification.

In this Property dialog box we can specify the monitoring Server and the Servers / Connectors to monitor. We also have to select the State (Critical and warning) for which we configure E-Mail notification.

First we will configure the Warning State notification.

In the “To” field select a recipient for the notifications. 

Change the Email server value to some other server in your organization which runs SMTP. If you do not have any, I suggest setting up a basic MS SMTP service in IIS. This is because when the monitored Server is the same Server as the monitoring Server we can run into trouble. The Server cannot send us an E-Mail notification when it is in an critical state and is unable to send E-Mails.

Next step is to configure E-mail Notifications for Critical State. Follow the same steps that we went through earlier for Warning state notification except for the fact that this time we will select Critical from the drop down.

Once done, close all the property pages and dialog boxes. We are done with the setup.

Now when one or more of the configured resources run into a “Critical” or “Warning” state we receive a E-Mail from an account “WMI@SERVERNAME” with a error message with the server name in the subject line and the condition of the resource / service in the E-Mail body.

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