Community
- Command Central
- MVP Program
- Monthly Mission
- Blogs
- Groups
- Events
- Media Vault
Products
- Observability
- Network Management
- Application Management
- IT Security
- IT Service Management
- System Management
- Database Management
Content Exchange
- SolarWinds Platform
- Server & Application Monitor
- Database Performance Analyzer
- Server Configuration Monitor
- Network Performance Monitor
- Network Configuration Manager
- SQL Sentry
- Web Help Desk
Free Tools & Trials

MAPI User Experiance Monitor Always Passes

I setup a MAPI user experience monitor under APM 3.0 and I found it strange that regardless of what node it's applied to, be it an actual MS Exchange server, or a networked toaster the monitor always passes. Is this normal or unexpected behavior?

Find more posts tagged with

Accepted answers

macnugetz

Questionario,

I've actually been working with Support and Engineering on your case; hopefully you have some answers by now. For anyone else interested in the answers to these questions, here you go:

1) It waits based on the job timeout. The default timeout is 20 minutes.

2) The monitor goes through the following steps with respect to mail flow:

Sends an email to the user mailbox via SMTP. The email has a unique temporary subject name which starts with APM_prefix.
Connects to mailbox through MAPI, then searches the emails by Subject.
If the email it's looking for isn't found, it waits then searches again. It will stop when: 1) it's found, or 2) the timeout is reached, or 3) the maximum number of attempts has been reached.
Once the email is found, the monitor deletes it from the inbox.
The monitor collects the total round trip time for the email and compares it with your thresholds.
Once it knows the round trip time, status will be given according where it falls in your thresholds. If the email isn't found or SMTP or MAPI reported an error, APM will mark the monitor as down.

3) Yes, emails the monitor sends are deleted, but only if the monitor successfully connected via MAPI. If the SMTP call succeeded but MAPI failed, the email will remain in the inbox.

4) No, this isn't possible.

HTH,

Craig

All comments

ShamChauthani

The behavior is expected based on the current implementation of the MAPI monitor. Let me clarify.

MAPI connections to exchange servers are stored in MAPI Profiles. When you assign a MAPI UX monitor to a node APM will create a profile tied to that node (oversimplification here). Once the profile is created APM will continue using that profile to test that monitor. So if you were to assign this monitor to another node it will continue to work because the profile contains correct exchange information.

I am going to open this as an issue in our tracking system (TT#2685)

Questionario

We also have some questions regarding the MAPI monitor, I opened Case#178906 for this:

1.) How long does the Monitor wait for the email to arrive until it declares the monitor as down?
2.) How exactly does the Monitor handle the mailflow? Is it correct that it sends all emails through the entered SMTP Server to the specified email the logs in with MAPI to the server the monitor is running on to log onto the mailbox, checks if the email is there and if it is there declares the monitor as up?
3.) Are emails in those mailboxes automatically deleted?
4.) Is it possible to use the monitor without SMTP and send the email from the same server the monitor is running on via MAPI?

currently we have a response time of ~80seconds on each monitor and some of them show as down (email not found in inbox), is it possible to increase the time it waits for the email?