Implementing Software Monitoring and Error-Detection Tools

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Monitoring your Microsoft® Exchange Server 2003 organization is critical to ensuring the high availability of messaging and collaboration services. Monitoring tools and techniques allow you to determine your system's health and identify potential issues before an error occurs. For example, monitoring tools allow you to proactively check for problems with connections, services, server resources, and system resources. Monitoring tools can also help you notify administrators when problems occur.

As you plan your monitoring strategy, you must decide which system components you want to monitor and how frequently you want to monitor them. To help with these decisions, consider the following questions:

  • Is messaging a mission-critical service in your organization? (In general, if Exchange messaging is a mission-critical service in your organization, you should monitor your system more frequently.)

  • What services do you rely on most? (In general, you should vigorously monitor the services on which most of your users rely.)

After considering these basic questions, you can begin planning a monitoring strategy that allows you to optimize the performance and availability of your Exchange 2003 messaging system.

Note

Prescriptive guidance for monitoring Exchange 2003 is beyond the scope of this guide. For detailed information about monitoring your Exchange messaging system, see Monitoring Exchange Server 2003 at Microsoft. Although this document focus on using Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) to monitor an enterprise messaging environment, the information is applicable whether or not you use MOM.