Monitoring Exchange 5.5

[beefstew]

Hi all,

My CIO has asked me to monitor all E-mail traffic going in and out of our mail server. How many messages. With or without attachments and loads of other silly little stats.

Most of the counters are easy to monitor apart from one which is peaks and troughs throughout the day. I see a counter in ExchangeIS Private/messages sent and delivered Per mintue but am not sure whether these are giving me an accurate readindg.

Does anyone know the best way to measure incoming/outgoing mails per hour without actually staring at the screen waiting for an hour to pass and taking down all the stats and adding them together?

 

[zbnet]

Turn on message archiving on the IMS for a couple of days. This will save a copy of ever inbound and outbound message in \EXCHSRVR\IMCDATA\IN\ARCHIVE and \OUT\ARCHIVE. As each message is stored in a separate file, you will be able to sort by timestamp and get a good idea of the busy times of the day; and as each file has a size, you'll be able to work out how much data the IMS moves each specific hour of the day.

Don't forget to turn off the archiving and delete the mail files in those directories when you've finished, or you'll likely run out of disk space sooner than you want to!

 

[FAM]

zbnet,

can you change the path to where it archives the emails (i.e onto my D:\ drive rather than C:\)?

 

[zbnet]

Sure you can, if you're feeling brave (I've never done this in reality, so maybe you'd like to test on a test machine first...?).

Make your new copy of the \EXCHSRVR\IMCDATA\ tree, complete with all the right sub-folders etc.
Stop the IMS.
Edit the registry on the IMS server, find \HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\MSExchangeIMC\Parameters\RootDir, update the value to point to the new location, exit the registry editor, and restart the IMS.

Let us know whether it works.

 

[FAM]

Thanks zbnet, im not if ive got the guts to start editing the registry... i suppose i could just periodically copy the archived files onto another part of the system every so often.

Thanks anyway.

 

[zbnet]

Excellent argument then to build yourself a test machine.

 

[HECL]

Hi guys

Need help from all of you Exchange 5.5 Experts .

To be honest i am no worm in exchange cause would like to know some features and right from the basic of Microsoft Exchange 5.5 sever and bit about Exchnage 2000,exchange 2003 which i need to complete within 2-3 days , tried using google and microsoft technet but the articles which i found would require lot of time to understand and to read .

I know its a vast subject to read and complete but if you experts have any document on the internet which i can read and i can make use of .


HEY I WOULD APPRICIATE IF YOU COULD REPLY BACK WITH THE POSITIVE ANSWERS

Thanks

Ransy

 

[Dyadmin]

Zbnet, you could also use the exchange 5.5 optimizer, it will move all the files you want and where including where you want your logged incoming and outgoing mail.

 

[zbnet]

That's true, I'd forgotten that Optimizer has the IMC data files setting when you run it on a server with the IMS installed.

At the end of the day, though, all the optimizer is doing there is automating the process of creating directories, moving the files, and setting the reg value.