Exchange 2003 message store monitoring

Question

Can Exchange 2003 monitor the message store (status, alerts, thresholds) or is there another way on the sever to monitor the store?

Answer 1

Exchange 2003 has monitoring built-in (Tools | Monitoring and Status in System Manager), and it's quite configurable: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310315. It may put some extra load on your server depending on what options you select.

Answer 2

In addition to what's built in, if you have Nagios on your network (and if not, you should give it some consideration) you will find a number of plug-ins to deal with Exchange monitoring.

Answer 3

I wrote a script and published to the Microsoft Script Center Repository, with the specific script here: http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/ScriptCenter/en-us/e5dd50bc-5e69-4eb9-b544-221493e12f0d.

To make it work run as a member of the Domain Admins (so that it can query that special location of AD). I put it into production at my work a couple months ago. (Much better than monitoring by a Director tapping your shoulder asking "is mail broken?"!)

It checks that the servers are pingable, that Exchange Services are running, that the Connectors are working, the Datastores are mounted, and the drives that store the Transaction logs are less than 50% utilized. On any fault, it sends an email. The script description describes what needs to be configured.

-Waldo