User goals and features

PATROL for Microsoft Exchange Servers (also referred to as PATROL for Exchange Servers) contains the knowledge that PATROL uses to monitor, analyze, and manage Microsoft Exchange Servers. PATROL for Exchange Servers supports the Microsoft Exchange 2003, 2007, 2010 and 2013 Server product. Throughout this space, Microsoft Exchange is referred to as Exchange. 

A version is specified only when the information is unique to that version.

PATROL for Microsoft Exchange Servers monitors the following elements of your Exchange server and its underlying network:

Server Health

PATROL for Exchange Servers monitors the following server health and performance information:

• Server availability
• Disk status
• Exchange error events
• Number of active connections

You can also monitor the following server subsystems as they relate to Exchange Servers:

• Application event logs
• Disk usage
• Network connection

If you have the PATROL KM for Windows Operating System installed, you can monitor CPU, memory, disk space, and event log parameters.
PATROL for Exchange Servers also monitors message traffic related to your server and summarizes the following information in the MailFlowStatusRpt parameter:

• Messages sent and received by individual servers within the site
• Total messages sent and received by all the servers within the site (intrasite)
• Total messages sent and received by all the servers from other sites within the Exchange organization (intersite)
• Messages sent and received by the Internet (foreign)
• Total messages sent and received by mailboxes on your server (local)
• Total messages sent and received by the Exchange Server (intrasite, intersite, foreign, and local)

PATROL for Exchange Servers examines the event logs provided by the server's operating system and summarizes the total number of information, warning, and error events related to the Exchange server.

For more information, see Monitoring server health

Top Consumers

PATROL for Exchange Servers monitors

• Mailboxes that contain the most messages
• Public folders that contain the most messages

You can base monitoring either on message count or total size of the messages.

For more information, see Monitoring and managing users and top consumers.

Storage

PATROL for Exchange Servers monitors

• Database file size
• Incoming message queue size
• Message delivery rates
• Average delivery time
• Number of transaction logs and total size
• Percentage of fragmentation of the database
• Free disk space on the drive containing the database

Managing Storage

PAROL for Exchange Servers provides the following management tasks for your Information Stores, storage groups, databases, and logs:

• Mounting and dismounting a database

Clusters

PATROL for Exchange Servers monitors Exchange 2007 clusters. PATROL for Exchange Servers monitors the cluster group status and allows you to manage cluster resources. You can perform the following tasks on cluster resources

• Fail the cluster resource over to another node
• Take the cluster resource offline or bring it online
• Move the cluster resource to another group

You can also perform the following tasks on the cluster resource group or cluster virtual server:

• Start and stop the cluster
• View the cluster properties
• Move the cluster to another node

For more information, see Monitoring and managing clusters

Server Queues

PATROL for Exchange Servers monitors submission queue, mailbox delivery queue, and remote delivery queue. PATROL monitors the number of messages, queue status, and queue delivery type.

For more information, see Monitoring and managing server queues.

Message traffic

PATROL for Exchange Servers monitors message traffic in terms of traffic between all servers within a site, total traffic sent and received within a site, total traffic sent and received between sites, and total traffic sent to and received from the Internet.

For more information, see Monitoring server message traffic.

Subsystem performance

PATROL for Exchange Servers information Store services, ExIPC, WebDav, directory components, the message transfer agent, databases, queues, connectors, store drivers, and address-list services to ensure Exchange subsystem performance (For more information, see Monitoring Exchange subsystem performance.

Key parameters

The parameters are key measures of Exchange Server health and performance. PATROL for Exchange Servers monitors key parameters .The Exchange server parameters that are most important to you depend on your environment and the server role. For more information, see Key parameters for day-to-day monitoring.

Critical Event Log events

PATROL for Exchange Servers 2007 and 2010 provides out-of-the-box monitoring of the critical Exchange-related Windows application Event Log events and provides event ID description to help you resolve problems.

Front-end servers

PATROL for Exchange Servers 2003 monitors the front-end servers in your environment. A front-end server accepts requests and forwards them to back-end servers for processing. A front-end server typically only processes requests for protocol servers such as Outlook Web Access Server, POP3, and IMAP. For more information, see Monitoring front-end servers.

Internet protocol servers

PATROL for Microsoft Exchange Servers 2003 monitors the following Internet protocols.

• Lightweight Directory Access Protocol ( LDAP)
• Network News Transport Protocol ( NNTP)
• Post Office Protocol 3 ( POP3)
• Internet Messaging Application Protocol ( IMAP4)
• HTTP/Distributed Authoring and Versioning ( DAV)
• Simple Mail Transfer Protocol ( SMTP)

Within each of these protocols, PATROL monitors the number of authentication and connection failures and the throughput to the various Internet protocol servers.

Response time

PATROL for Exchange Servers 2003 monitors client-to-server response time, server-to-server response time, and server-to-Internet server response time as part of synthetic transaction RoundTrip monitoring. For more information, see Monitoring RoundTrip response time.

Database Availability Groups (DAG)

DAG is a set of sixteen (or less) Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 or 2013 mailbox servers that provide automatic database-level recovery from a database, server, or network failure. The mailbox servers in a DAG monitor each other for failures. When a mailbox server is added to a DAG, it works with the other servers in the DAG to provide automatic database-level recovery. For information, see Database Availability Groups (DAG).

  Support for Internet Protocol version 6

BMC Performance Manager for Microsoft Exchange Servers now supports Internet  Protocol version 6 (IPv6) on the following versions of Microsoft Exchange Servers:

• Microsoft Exchange Servers 2007 (Service Pack 1 and 2) - Dual-stack host
• Microsoft Exchange Servers 2010 - Dual-stack host
• Microsoft Exchange Servers 2013