Monitoring the holidays

As many of us plan to take some time off for various and assorted holidays (Christmas myself, though I do celebrate Festivus as well), our Exchange servers will hopefully run along on their own, brimming with Holiday Cheer!

However, due to the nature of the business, it might not be a bad idea to keep an eye on the servers without actually being in the office.  Not only does this mean you'll be able to look like a rock start to your boss, but it also means you can enjoy the time off without constantly worrying about your systems blowing up.

Monitoring tools can take many forms.  They can range from relatively simple ping-test solutions that just make sure the server looks alive, to more complex solutions that monitor application or even individual service health over time.  Which one you need really depends on the complexity of your environment and what you feel you need to keep an eye on.

Looks-alive solutions will regularly poll a server via some form of heartbeat system - generally an ICMP Ping.  If a server fails to respond to a pre-set number of pings, then the server is declared offline and alerts are sent out or other pre-configured actions are taken.  These systems are great for smaller shops that just want to be sure the servers are responding, or as part of larger monitoring solutions for enterprise systems. They are generally either free or very low cost, and often found as part of different solutions for Disaster Recovery (see disclaimer below), backup tools, etc.

More extensive monitoring packages can come in many flavors, but the two most common are service/application monitoring tools and log monitoring tools.

Service/application monitors are very common for most mid-sized and larger organizations to have running in their networks.  This can be something like Microsoft Operations Manager (now called Systems Center Operations Manager) - mostly for windows systems - to the more universal tools like Tivoli, NetIQ and SiteScope.  These tools generally require agents to run on servers (though not always) and allow you to not only test for simple connectivity, but also see if Exchange itself is responding to common queries, that its component services are properly up and running, etc.

Most of these types of solutions also monitor logs of various types.  That gives them the ability not only to see current problems, but to track errors and other hiccups over time to alert you if there might be a bigger issue brewing.  This can be things like looking for Exchange page errors - and indicator that a disk could be failing on you.

The drawback is that these solutions are typically not free, and in many cases will cost quite a lot.  They're worth every penny in nearly every situation, but it is a budget item you'll need to plan for and another expense you'll have to pay out.

Monitoring of your servers can let you know if things are either going wrong, or about to go wrong, within your Exchange environment.  They allow you to keep an eye on your servers even if you're not physically watching your servers.

Happy Holidays everyone!  And here's hoping you don't find yourself beating the living daylights out of your servers with The Festivus Pole!