Chapter 4: Enterprise Monitoring 67

Status

The details pane of the Status container allows you to view the status of servers and
connectors in your organization.
The Status container shows the following server states:
◆Available – This shows that the server is online and all the main services are running
normally.
◆Unreachable – This shows that one of the main services on the server is down.
◆In Maintenance Mode – This shows that monitoring is disabled on this server for
maintenance.
◆Unknown –This shows that the system attendant on the monitoring server cannot
communicate with the monitored server.
When looking at connectors in the Status container, you will see the following possible
states:
◆Available –This shows that the connector is functioning normally.
◆Unavailable –This shows that something is not functioning properly on the connector
and that someone will need to investigate further.

Disabling Server Monitoring

In some circumstances it is necessary to take a server down for scheduled maintenance, or
to rebuild a server that has failed. In cases where you are already aware of the problem,
you can prevent a series of alerts from being issued by choosing the properties of the server
in the Status details pane and selecting Disable all monitoring on this server. When your
maintenance is complete, you can return to this dialog box and clear the option.
Centralized Availability Monitoring
In many environments, it is particularly important to have some sort of centralized avail-
ability monitoring if you are to meet your SLAs. Trend analysis is also very important, so
you can avoid losing availability. In particular, if you monitor and find a degradation in
performance over time, it may be an indicator of impending availability problems.
AppManager from NetIQ has a number of features that assist in availability monitoring. A
lengthy response time in sending and receiving mail to another server running Exchange
may indicate a loss of availability somewhere in the path the message would normally
follow. AppManager also tells you when services are down, when queue lengths are
abnormally high, or when public folders are inactive (perhaps because of a problem with
replication to that folder).
Regardless of whether or not you choose to use AppManager or similar third-party tools in
your organization, you should carefully consider finding a way of gathering information
centrally about your Exchange environment. It is very important that information on
existing or impending availability problems quickly reaches a person who can do some-
thing about it.