Today, I’m going to talk about the importance of monitoring your Microsoft Exchange database. For those who may not know what Exchange is, here is a very brief description:

If you are using Outlook as your email client, and you are able to share your calendar, contacts, to-dos, etc. with colleagues, chances are you are using Exchange, the most popular email server application available (McCreath, 2007).

Now that we’ve got that over-simplified explanation out of the way, on to a couple of reasons why you should be monitoring this database. First, Exchange keeps a log of every single event that occurs on its database, in what are called Transaction Logs (Buike, 2006). These logs can become quite large, and if not maintained, can easily bring the operating system to a screeching halt, especially if Exchange is stored on the OS partition. Second, the Exchange database can become fragmented over time, appearing to be much larger than it actually is. This is a natural occurrence because of the way the database works. Depending on who you talk to, offline defragmentation of the database should be performed when the database reaches somewhere around 15% whitespace.

These were two in a long list of reasons why it is very important to not only perform preventative maintenance tasks on your exchange database, but to also monitor your Exchange database for potential problems. There are many things to watch for on your Exchange database, much more than I am willing to go into in this article. For a relatively detailed list of things to look for, check out Brett Johnson’s presentation (Johnson, 2004).

In conclusion, here are a few questions to ask of yourself, or to ask of whoever is maintaining your Exchange system:

• Are Exchange event logs being monitored?
• Is disk space on the Exchange server(s) being monitored?
• Are preventative maintenance tasks being performed?
• Is your Exchange database being regularly backed up, are backup logs being verified, and are test restores being conducted?
• Is mail flow being monitored?
• Are database (information store) counters being monitored?

Approximately 90% of Exchange administrators never attempt maintenance until a disaster hits (Johnson, 2004). Don’t allow your company to lose valuable working time while your IT guy tries to figure out what went wrong with Exchange database.

Bibliography

McCreath, M. S. (2007, Dec 1). Inferring Relative Popularity of SMTP Servers. Retrieved from Stillhq.com: Mikai, a geek from Canberra: http://www.stillhq.com/research/smtp/survey/poster-lisa2007.html

Buike, R. (2006, May 30). Transaction Logs, The Lifeblood of Exchange. Retrieved from MSExchange.org: http://www.msexchange.org/articles/Transaction-Logs-Lifeblood-Exchange.html

Johnson, B. (2004). Microsoft Downloads. Retrieved from Microsoft: http://download.microsoft.com/documents/uk/technet/learning/downloads/evenings/TechNet_Event_Exchange_Server_9th_Feb_Brett_Johnson.ppt

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