Exchange 2003 Counter Monitoring

Thwack Group,

Looking for best practice on how to monitor incoming and outgoing email counters from exchange 2003. Trying to get a feel on how others are monitoring numbers and how they are sending notifications if the mail server is not functional (some posted examples of the queries would help greatly since i am not a programmer by any means). I know there will be questions on specific examples... i don't have any. Just trying to get some good monitoring advice for exchange 2003 (specifically cluster numbers, monitoring, examples). Thanks! - ktb

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Accepted answers

ktbrown

Guys,

I think I found my issue... I was trying to use the generic "WMI monitor" to monitor "counters" and not the "Performance Counter Monitor" to find the "performance objects" when running the query against the exchange 2003 server. The "Exchange 2000-2003 Template" on thwack worked for everything but these particular counters, but when I let the "PERFORMANCE COUNTER MONITOR" search for the queues under the "MSExchangeIS Mailbox" Category and put in the "Receive Queue Size" and "Sent Queue Size" in the counter box... it looked to give me what I needed.

Thank you both for the help!

DS, you explained that to me, but it never clicked until I saw the perf counter monitor check box. It still doesnt explain why the template won't accept the information as-is... but it does give me a work-around to the problem with a custom counter monitor.

- ktb

Enable Component:	True	Override Template
Credential for Monitoring:	NetMon	Override Template

Category:	MSExchangeIS Mailbox	Override Template

Counter:	Receive Queue Size	Override Template

Instance:	_Total	Override Template

All comments

DirtySouth

We monitor our 3 exchange servers with the following APM monitors:

Mailbox Receive Queue, Mailbox Send Queue, SMTP Local Queue, SMTP Remote Queue & SMTP Categorizer Queue. I also monitor the Information Store, MTA Stacks & System Attendant services. There are plenty of other counters you could potentially monitor, but these are the main ones we are concerned about.

ktbrown

DS,

Thank You! Would you happen to be able to post examples on how the counters are setup... specifically the grammer involved with the strings to monitor them.

mark_wiggans

Here is one example.

mark_wiggans

and this one-