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Exchange Server Needs Proactive Monitoring

Praveen Manohar

A major chunk of communication in an organization happens via email and any downtime in email can impact productivity and revenue. This is why availability and performance of Microsoft Exchange is vital for an organization that uses it.

To maintain uptime of Microsoft Exchange, it's essential that performance and availability is continuously monitored. But what are the parameters that have to be monitored? Here are some issues that can affect your exchange server performance and the parameters that need to be monitored to avoid those issues.

Storage Performance

As an IT admin, you would have seen cases where Microsoft Outlook users experience poor performance while trying to fetch emails from the exchange server. Storage Performance, i.e. input/output operations per second (IOPS), on the exchange server could be the culprit here. This is because IOPS defines how fast data - in our case email data - can be written to or read from the storage. Monitoring the performance of the Exchange storage lets you know of possible performance issues that can have an effect on mail fetching or sending.

RPC Threads

Do you often get support calls with users complaining that Outlook is unable to connect to their mailbox? One cause for this can be unavailability of Remote Procedure Call (RPC) threads. Outlook client connects using RPC threads to the Exchange server to perform operations, such as sending and receiving email, creating appointments, meetings and tasks, and so on. There's a limit in the number of available RPC threads on an Exchange server.

In cases where all RPC threads get used up, Outlook client automatically retries the connection until RPC threads are available making the user action slow. You can make RPC counters, such as RPC Requests, RPC operations/sec and RPC Averaged Latency counters throw alerts when the permitted limit is crossed by monitoring them. And once you receive an alert, you can restart the Exchange RPC Client Access service to free up RPC threads.

Something else is that an increase in the usage of RPC threads can also cause a bottleneck on the server’s resources, (RAM and CPU) thereby slowing down the server itself.

Replication

Data loss incidents, such as file corruption, water damage, human error, and so on can occur in an organization. All organizations should foresee these undesirable incidents and they need a database backup.

Most organizations run Exchange with the replication feature. This feature from Microsoft Exchange Server enables high availability for the Exchange Server's database. But just having this feature in your Exchange Server is not enough, ensuring the proper operation of replication is needed. An improper or fractional database backup is as bad as not having a backup at all. Thus copy status, copy queue, and replay queue for both the active and passive copies of all mailbox databases should be monitored to ensure there's no failure looming.

Further, replication status check is essential for factors like Active Manager, Cluster Service, and Replay Service, etc.

Storage Limits

When storage used to be expensive, Exchange admins used to limit the size of the mailbox storage. But now, because of cheaper storage space many admins decide not to have storage limits. This can cause the database size to grow and further on cause issues, such as a backup failure or increased restore time. Thus it is recommended to limit the mailbox size to minimize the time needed for data restore and reduce the probability of backup failure. Monitoring the mailbox size helps check if the applied rules for maintaining the mailbox size is operational.

Detailed monitoring and proper alerting for the above mentioned counters will help you take action before most undesirable events happen or get out of hand.

Praveen Manohar is a Head Geek at SolarWinds.

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Exchange Server Needs Proactive Monitoring

Praveen Manohar

A major chunk of communication in an organization happens via email and any downtime in email can impact productivity and revenue. This is why availability and performance of Microsoft Exchange is vital for an organization that uses it.

To maintain uptime of Microsoft Exchange, it's essential that performance and availability is continuously monitored. But what are the parameters that have to be monitored? Here are some issues that can affect your exchange server performance and the parameters that need to be monitored to avoid those issues.

Storage Performance

As an IT admin, you would have seen cases where Microsoft Outlook users experience poor performance while trying to fetch emails from the exchange server. Storage Performance, i.e. input/output operations per second (IOPS), on the exchange server could be the culprit here. This is because IOPS defines how fast data - in our case email data - can be written to or read from the storage. Monitoring the performance of the Exchange storage lets you know of possible performance issues that can have an effect on mail fetching or sending.

RPC Threads

Do you often get support calls with users complaining that Outlook is unable to connect to their mailbox? One cause for this can be unavailability of Remote Procedure Call (RPC) threads. Outlook client connects using RPC threads to the Exchange server to perform operations, such as sending and receiving email, creating appointments, meetings and tasks, and so on. There's a limit in the number of available RPC threads on an Exchange server.

In cases where all RPC threads get used up, Outlook client automatically retries the connection until RPC threads are available making the user action slow. You can make RPC counters, such as RPC Requests, RPC operations/sec and RPC Averaged Latency counters throw alerts when the permitted limit is crossed by monitoring them. And once you receive an alert, you can restart the Exchange RPC Client Access service to free up RPC threads.

Something else is that an increase in the usage of RPC threads can also cause a bottleneck on the server’s resources, (RAM and CPU) thereby slowing down the server itself.

Replication

Data loss incidents, such as file corruption, water damage, human error, and so on can occur in an organization. All organizations should foresee these undesirable incidents and they need a database backup.

Most organizations run Exchange with the replication feature. This feature from Microsoft Exchange Server enables high availability for the Exchange Server's database. But just having this feature in your Exchange Server is not enough, ensuring the proper operation of replication is needed. An improper or fractional database backup is as bad as not having a backup at all. Thus copy status, copy queue, and replay queue for both the active and passive copies of all mailbox databases should be monitored to ensure there's no failure looming.

Further, replication status check is essential for factors like Active Manager, Cluster Service, and Replay Service, etc.

Storage Limits

When storage used to be expensive, Exchange admins used to limit the size of the mailbox storage. But now, because of cheaper storage space many admins decide not to have storage limits. This can cause the database size to grow and further on cause issues, such as a backup failure or increased restore time. Thus it is recommended to limit the mailbox size to minimize the time needed for data restore and reduce the probability of backup failure. Monitoring the mailbox size helps check if the applied rules for maintaining the mailbox size is operational.

Detailed monitoring and proper alerting for the above mentioned counters will help you take action before most undesirable events happen or get out of hand.

Praveen Manohar is a Head Geek at SolarWinds.

Hot Topics

The Latest

As businesses increasingly rely on high-performance applications to deliver seamless user experiences, the demand for fast, reliable, and scalable data storage systems has never been greater. Redis — an open-source, in-memory data structure store — has emerged as a popular choice for use cases ranging from caching to real-time analytics. But with great performance comes the need for vigilant monitoring ...

Kubernetes was not initially designed with AI's vast resource variability in mind, and the rapid rise of AI has exposed Kubernetes limitations, particularly when it comes to cost and resource efficiency. Indeed, AI workloads differ from traditional applications in that they require a staggering amount and variety of compute resources, and their consumption is far less consistent than traditional workloads ... Considering the speed of AI innovation, teams cannot afford to be bogged down by these constant infrastructure concerns. A solution is needed ...

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

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