Monitoring Exchange Performance without admin access

August 26, 2009 12:51 AM

How do I monitor ms exchange 2003 performance without admin access?

Hi Guys,

I'm trying to log exchange performance on our hosted service. A number of guys around the office experience drop outs, and long outbox queues.

I was wondering to what extent I am able to monitor exchange performance from a lowly user account.

Bonus points if you can recomend a way to do this in *nix. :)

Thanks.

posted by Coolcan2 to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

The perfmon counters for Outlook would be the obvious thing to monitor. You can do this remotely - there's at least one Perl module, Win32::Perfmon. This way you'd monitor the client symptoms of possible Exchange performance drops - it should be at least enough to build a solid case for your service provider.

Then, they'll tell you that it's your network, so having some solid evidence that your network is fast for everything else is probably not a bad idea.
posted by dhoe at 3:55 AM on August 26, 2009

Control + right click on the taskbar icon for outlook while it's running, and choose 'connection status'. It will tell you your current connection to the exchange server, the domain controller, your public folders server, bridgehead and whatever else. In the req/fail column anything other than a 0 for the second number indicates dropped packets. To figure out if the client computer, the mailbox or the server is the one having the issue, enable troubleshooing in the outlook client. (Tools>options>other tab>advanced>enable logging.

This should get you started. After that, packet sniffing to your router, etc, but if you don't have access to the exchange server all you can do is determine your connections and speeds are more than adequate for the job and turn it over to the hosted service. If it's still crappy, ask them to run perfwiz and give you the average IOPS stats, per user, for your exchange service. If you are blackberry/iphone users that increases mapi connections per mailbox considerably and this will cause increased IOPS also.

Oh, if you or any of your coworkers have more than 5000 items in a single folder, break that up into subfolders. Item count, not overall mailbox size, is the single biggest factor affecting IOPS and server performance.

Clearly I could go on all day about this. Memail me if you have any questions.
posted by 8dot3 at 6:37 AM on August 26, 2009