Microsoft 1 Availability Monitoring

Chapter 4: Enterprise Monitoring 65

NetIQ AppManager contains useful features to help with Event monitoring. It detects

whether any servers have written critical error messages to the Event Log and automates

responses to actions, including issuing SNMP traps.

Availability Monitoring

To meet your availability SLAs, you need to ensure that, as much as possible, you protect

against downtime. Because it is impossible to guarantee that there will be no unexpected

downtime in your organization, you need to ensure that you are notified quickly in the

event of unexpected downtime.

Whenever you are monitoring and measuring Exchange 2000 Server availability, it is

important to consider domain controllers as well as servers running Exchange. You may do

all you can to ensure high reliability of servers running Exchange, but they will not have

high availability if there are no domain controllers available for Exchange or the clients to

use. Therefore you should also monitor domain controller/global catalog server availability

as well as network availability.

Monitoring and Status Tool

The monitoring and status tool is available in Exchange System Manager. This tool is used

to monitor Exchange services and perform actions if the services fail. For Exchange to run

as it should, a set of default services should be running. These services are:

◆Microsoft Exchange Information Store Service

◆Microsoft Exchange MTA Stacks

◆Microsoft Exchange Routing Engine

◆Microsoft Exchange System Attendant

◆Simple Mail Transport Protocol

◆World Wide Web Publishing Service

If any of these services are not running, Exchange 2000 logs a critical state warning in

Event Viewer.

Note: The Monitoring and Status tool does not notify you if a store has become dismounted.

To ensure that you are notified of a dismounted store, you will need to use other monitoring

tools such as Prospector. Prospector is available at no charge if you engage Microsoft Consult-

ing Services (MCS). For more information about this tool, contact MCS.

Adding Services to the Default Configuration

You can add additional services to the default Microsoft Exchange services that are

monitored by the Monitoring and Status tool. If any of these additional services fail, they

log a critical state warning, just as the default services do. This is particularly useful if you

Contents

Main ii Contents Chapter 1 Introduction 1 Chapter 2 Capacity and Availability Management 11 Change and Configuration Management 37 Chapter 4 Enterprise Monitoring 53 Chapter 5 Protection 71 Chapter 6 Glossary 97 Support 89 Page Page Page Introduction Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) Page How to Use This Guide Efficiency, Continuity, and Security Figure 1.2 Efficiency Continuity Security Chapter Outlines Planning and Deployment Service Level Agreements Features Performance Recovery Support Related Topics Page Capacity and Availability Management Capacity Management Page Page Availability Management Service Hours Service Availability Minimizing System Failures Decreasing Single Points of Failure Increasing the Reliability of Exchange 2000 Minimizing System Recovery Time Performance Tuning Making Changes to the Registry No Performance Optimizer Optimizable Features Tuning Considerations Upgrading from Exchange 5.5 to Exchange 2000 Tuning the Message Transfer Agent (MTA) Tuning SMTP Transport Mailroot Directory Location SMTP File Handles Page Store and ESE Tuning Online Store Maintenance Online Backups Choosing the Correct Maintenance Strategy Extensible Storage Engine (ESE) Heaps Store-Database Cache Size Page Log Buffers Tuning Active Directory Integration Page Tuning Outlook Web Access (OWA) Page Hardware Upgrades Page Change and Configuration Management Prerequisites Change Management Defining Change Type Step 1 Request for Change Is Submitted to Change Manager Step 2 Change Manager Assesses the RFC Step 3 Change Is Passed to IT Executive Committee for Approval Step 4 Change Is Passed to the Change Advisory Board for Scheduling Step 5 Change Is Passed to the Change Owner Step 6 Change Process Evaluation Minor and Standard Changes Scripting Minor and Standard Changes Security Software Control and Distribution Documentation Configuration Management Tools for Configuration Management Configuration Management and Change Management Configuration Items Page Page Page Defining Configuration Items Configuration Management and Exchange Maintaining the Configuration Management Database Change Management Ownership Security Backup Exchange System Policies Administering System Policies Page Enterprise Monitoring Prerequisites Performance Monitoring System Monitor Exchange 2000 Objects and Counters to Monitor Service or Resource Performance Object Information Store Counters SMTP Server MSExchangeMTA and MSExchangeMTAConnections MSExchangeIM Virtual Servers MSExchangeAL Windows 2000 Objects and Counters to Monitor Table 4.2 Subjects and Associated Objects and Counters Subsystem Object Counter Exchange Comments Subsystem Object Counter Exchange Comments Centralized Monitoring Event Monitoring Event Viewer Log Files Centralized Event Monitoring Availability Monitoring Monitoring and Status Tool Adding Services to the Default Configuration Monitoring Resources Notifications Status Disabling Server Monitoring Centralized Availability Monitoring Client Monitoring Page Page Protection Chapter Start Point Chapter End Point Protection Against Hacking Firewall Operations Maintaining Firewall Availability Ensuring That Only the Correct Traffic Passes Through the Firewall Monitoring Against Hacker Intrusion Dealing With Security Breaches Anti-Virus Measures Staying Current Dealing With Virus Infection Blocking Attachments at the Client Page Disaster Recovery Procedures Backing Up Page Offline Backup Disk Imaging Restoring Recovering Individual Messages Recovering Lost Mailboxes Recovering Exchange Stores and Storage Groups Full Exchange Server Recovery Recovering Exchange After Active Directory Failure Alternate Server Recovery Recovery Testing Page Page Support Providing Support for End Users Reducing End User Support Costs Page Problem Reporting Dealing with User Problems Notifying Users Exchange Problem Management Page Page Glossary