Microsoft 1 manual Performance Monitoring, System Monitor

54Microsoft Exchange 2000 Operations Guide — Version 1.0

Performance Monitoring

Performance Monitoring is the monitoring of existing system(s) to ensure that optimum use is made of the hardware resources, and that agreed performance levels can be main- tained.

Performance Monitoring allows you to determine if your server running Exchange 2000 is meeting the performance standards you have defined in your service level agreements (SLAs). Over time, you can use Performance Monitoring to generate data that can be used in trend analysis. This alerts you to possible performance and availability issues in the future, and allows you to solve problems before they arise).

One of the first tasks involved in performance monitoring is to generate a baseline. This baseline is a measure of what figures you expect to see when measuring a healthy system. This can then be compared to the figures you gather in day-to-day monitoring, allowing you to track problems easily.

In this section, you will look at the objects and counters that you may want to monitor using System Monitor. These parameters will form the basis of your baseline. You will also examine centralized monitoring techniques for remote servers.

System Monitor

If your e-mail system was Exchange Server 5.5, you are probably accustomed to using Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 Performance Monitor to analyze the performance of your Exchange 5.5 server. Exchange Server 5.5 includes a series of Performance Monitor Workspaces to allow you to quickly see in graph form a series of key counters.

The Windows 2000 operating system includes System Monitor (which consists of Perfor- mance Monitor and Network Monitor) for analyzing the performance of your system. When you install Exchange 2000 Server, a large number of objects are installed and counters are associated with those objects.

It is worth noting that while real-time graphs created in System Monitor often look very pretty, they are only of limited use, particularly if no one is looking at them. If you continually monitor 500 different counters on your server running Exchange, the self- monitoring uses CPU cycles. You have now undermined the performance of that server just by monitoring it. So only monitor what you need to, and consider using Performance Logging and Alerts, which can produce much more useful information with less of a load on the server. Reducing the frequency of monitoring produces much less of a load on the server and in many cases produces a more accurate picture, depending on the counters in question.

Note: Remote monitoring is almost always better than self-monitoring, because performance is not tainted by the load caused by monitoring. For more information about remote monitoring, see articles Q243283, Creating a Log File to Send to Customers for Remote Monitoring and Q240389, Error Message: Event ID: 2028 “The Service was Unable to Add the Counter \\Server_Name\Counter_Name” in the Microsoft Knowledge Base.