Microsoft Exchange Questions

Hi Everyone,

I'm trying to use AppInsight for Exchange more effectively.

Which is better, WMI or Agent and Why?

Which components are the most critical when looking for performance issues or outages, other than CPU and Memory spikes?

Do you know why I have some gray (unknown) status for my mailbox databases?

Thanks in advance!

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taylor.crowley

For Windows servers, I would usually recommend an agent just because this can perform polling independent of the SolarWinds polling engine and continue to perform polling for some time should a connection be lost between the endpoint and the SolarWinds server. It will also be better from a security and authentication point of view. WMI uses ephemeral ports, whereas Agent will only use one port to poll metrics with the SolarWinds server. This port is different depending on whether it is server- or agent-initiated communication.

Agents will also be the easiest to implement when configuring the endpoint for monitoring and monitoring after that since they use the LocalSystem account rather than a domain admin account, which may be subject to certain domain policies.

The unknown components could be due to a number of reasons, but I recommend that the best way to investigate this is to enable debug logging for the application monitor in question and look for errors in the APM logs on the SolarWinds server. There is a guide for this process here - https://solarwindscore.my.site.com/SuccessCenter/s/article/Turn-on-application-debugging-for-SAM?language=en_US

Please let me know if you have further questions

larkman808

Thanks so much for your reply!

As you can guess, we are having some Exchange opportunities

There are times, out of no where, our Exchange server CPU spikes to 100%.

We go through our normal troubleshooting process, but was wondering if there is a tool or feature in SolarWinds that can give us a granular root cause like we have an unusual Exchange process currently eating all resources running on Exchange database 14, for example.

Thanks for your help and expertise!

mesverrum

The appinsight for exchange template monitors most of the relevant exchange processes but you will often find that seeing exchange use up 100% cpu doesn't actually tell you why or what you could do to mitigate it.

You'll probably be looking at the performance counters and queues to see what activity it is that spikes just before your cpu goes through the roof. The template covers most, but not all, of those as well.

larkman808

Thanks for your help!