A free way to monitor the performance of Exchange Server

How often does your corporate mail service go down and become inaccessible?

For some companies, not having access to their emails for even an hour could cause massive disruption to business continuity. In laymen term, if the mail server goes down, we’re talking about potentially losing sales, missing deadlines, and even getting complaints from clients who could not get a simple email accross.

There are many types of mail and messaging servers out there in the market today. One of the most common and reliable one has to be Microsoft Exchange, a product by Microsoft which existed since year 1996. After more than 10 years later and several version upgrades, the latest version of this messaging and collaborative software is now Microsoft Exchange 2007. Photo by Mzelle Biscotte

In this post, I’m not going to mention about all the great features of Exchange but rather, how can the server guy monitor the status and performance of Exchange to ensure that the email service is always up and runnning 24 by 7.

One way to manage and maintain the uptime of Exchange server would be to install an Exchange monitoring tool. The tool should be able to help to:

Quickly identify any problems with Exchange
Warn if the mail queue is getting bigger (usually an indication of a potential problem)
Highlight performance issues via the traffic light indicators
Monitor critical statuses of the server such as low disk space, high cpu and memory utilization

Now you must be thinking, a useful tool like this must cost a bomb to invest.

Well.. guess what, there’s a FREE Exchange Monitoring Tool by SolarWinds. All you’ll need to do is to fill up a simple form and proceed to download the software. As simple as that.

Only problem is that the tool only supports Microsoft Exchange 2000 and 2003. For those with the latest version, too bad. But maybe it has got some in built monitoring capability in place.

Download SolarWinds Exchange Monitor: Your desktop dashboard for Exchange server health.

Enjoy.

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