Monitoring Exchange Server 2003 and Notification

Exchange 2003 Standard and Enterprise offers the feature to monitor the Server status of the Exchange Servers in your Enterprise. If some of the monitored services and other Resources (RAM, CPU, Services) are in “Warning state” or “Critical State” you receive a status E-Mail or a customized action provided by a script notification. This article explains in detailed steps how to configure Monitoring and E-Mail notification.
The article is based on Windows 2003 Enterprise Edition (Build 3790) and Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 (Build 6944.4).


To start with:

Where to start monitoring?

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 SnapIn and select the appropriate Server object in the Servers container.

There are many Resources available for monitoring. You can add the following Resources:
• Available Virtual Memory
• CPU Utilization
• Free disk space
• SMTP queue growth
• Windows 2003 Service
• X.400 queue growth

For many Services you can change the state to “Critical” and “Warning” when the service is not running.
In large environments you can define E-Mail notifications for the 1st level support staff for services which are in “Warning” state and define E-Mail notifications for 2nd level support staff when the services are in “Critical” state.

It is a good idea to configure the monitoring of the available disk space for your hard discs where your Exchange databases and transaction logs reside.
 
In the Status container in Exchange System Manager you can see the Status of all your Servers and Connectors in your Exchange organization.
 

Now configure an E-Mail notification for the recipients of the “Warning” and “Critical” state conditions.
 
In the Property dialog box you can specify the monitoring Server and the Servers / Connectors to monitor. You also have to select the State (Critical and warning) for which you configure E-Mail notification.

In the “To” field select a recipient for the notifications.
In the “E-Mail Server” field you have to specify the E-Mail Sever for sending the notifications.

WARNING: When the monitored Server is the same Server as the monitoring Server you can run into trouble because which Server can send you an E-Mail notification when it is in a critical state and is unable to send E-Mails.

In large environments Its recommend creating a dedicated monitoring Server only for monitoring purposes.
You should also have a look at the Microsoft Operation Manager (MOM).

For scheduled maintenance you must “disable monitoring of this server” because a server which is shut down can produce unwanted E-Mail notifications that, for example, some services are down and so on.
 

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