Topper for Exchange Management

TOPPER for Exchange Management

Topper for Exchange Management can conduct round the clock monitoring of your Exchange network and alert you to any abnormal situations that arise. Topper for Exchange Management includes 6 basic types of testing that help to ensure the proper and timely functioning of your Exchange environment.

Microsoft Exchange logon tests are performed by Topper to validate the availability of users to respective Exchange servers. TOPPER logs on to Microsoft Exchange user mailboxes in order to perform these tests. If TOPPER cannot log on, or if the logon exceeds a specified number of seconds, an alarm is raised and notifications can be sent to inform the appropriate staff.

Exchange message probing allow Topper to perform email testing and time the delivery of electronic mail. Email monitoring is the heart of the matter for both managerial oversight of messaging service levels and day-to-day operations. The email tests are actual electronic mail messages sent to specific destinations. The electronic messages, called messaging probes, are then immediately returned to Topper confirming that the messaging application and its supportive hardware, software, and network connectivity are functioning properly. If a test does not return in a predefined period of time, alarms and notifications may be sent to the operations staff to inform of that fact. Statistical reports may be generated to track and demonstrate the level of service quality. For the vast majority of TOPPER users, this type of testing is the reason why TOPPER was chosen. For Microsoft Exchange probing, an account on an Exchange server acts as our entry point into the Exchange world. From there TOPPER can send through your Exchange environment. It does this by sending a probe to the System Attendant id at the other Exchange server requesting a confirmation of delivery back to TOPPER. It can also send probes to other mail systems or the Internet to check the availability of those systems.

Performance Objects - Topper can monitor the overall health of any NT or Exchange performance object (a performance counter registered with NT by either the operating system or any software/hardware vendor). TOPPER enables you to set up continuous monitoring of these objects tailored for your own environment. Each performance object is configured such in a fashion that makes sense (i.e., for disk space, an absolute set of thresholds are configured whereas for CPU utilization, thresholds would be specified over time (see example). This unique configuration scheme helps ensure that alerts make sense and eliminates the possibility of false alerts. As with other TOPPER testing, once an alert situation is uncovered, a notification is sent to the appropriate staff.

NT and Exchange Services - Topper has the ability to monitor each critical service on your server and attempt to restart if Topper detects the service is not running. If TOPPER cannot restart the service, it will generate an alert to notify the appropriate staff.

Exchange Performance Set - Performance sets are pre-configured groups of performance objects that may be copied and used to monitor multiple servers with a common set of monitoring points. Topper for Exchange Management comes with a pre-configured set of performance objects that will monitor the basic underlying NT performance objects (CPU utilization, Disk utilization etc.) and additionally will monitor Exchange specific performance objects such as MTA processes, work queues, and connectors.
NT Event Log Filtering - Topper can filter NT Event Log events in real-time to help uncover problems as they occur. The NT Event Logs store individual status records about processes and services running on NT workstations and servers including Exchange specific error conditions. An Event is actually a status record written by some process running on the PC providing status and diagnostic information.

On an NT 4.0 computer there are three event logs:

System Events

Application Events

Security Events

Windows 2000 has added three additional Event Logs:

Directory Services

DNS Server Log

File Replication Service Log

Each of these logs can be filtered against two types of criteria,

Each event in the logs has been categorized by the providing vendor and classified as either a Warning or Error. These can be automatically captured by Topper and mapped to Topper's Minor and Major error conditions, and alert notification rules can be established for each. Additionally, TOPPER provides the ability to exclude certain of these conditions, that for your enterprise, are not considered as important conditions to monitor against. This capability allows you to configure filtering in a matter of seconds.

Secondly, for specific errors not flagged by the vendor, a text string entry can be configured that TOPPER will use to filter against the event logs. When a record contains the text string, an notification will be made to the appropriate staff.