In very large organizations, there is a budget for specialized IT staff to undergo training in a specific functional area.  Individuals are employed to ensure each component of the infrastructure is kept at its most efficient. Small to midsize organizations have smaller support teams.  These small companies may still have the same infrastructure requirement of their larger brethren.  Dedicated administrators are not always practical in a midsize organization.

Microsoft Exchange Server is a powerful technology and is critical for corporate communications. Exchange is a sophisticated technology that benefits from expert tuning, maintenance and monitoring. Because of the foundational role Exchange plays in an organization of any size, it must be the most stable element or the company is at risk.

For smaller companies, a dedicated Exchange administrator is rarely an option. Simple and efficient tools are needed to aid the generalist administrator

Based on customer and partner feedback, Microsoft developed System Center Essentials 2007 (Essentials 2007), a proactive and unified management solution that enables IT professionals in midsize organizations to more efficiently secure, update, monitor and troubleshoot their IT environments.

Essentials helps prevent outages and ease the tasks associated with running an environment which includes Exchange server.

Key differentiating features of Essentials 2007:

  • Unified Experience - A unified solution with a single console for managing your servers, clients, hardware, software, and IT services
  • Proactive Management - Monitoring, troubleshooting and asset tracking to keep your IT environment secure and up-to-date
  • Increased Efficiency - Simple execution of complex management tasks.

Essentials 2007 was developed with the goal to address customer paint points of Exchange Management for the midsize company.

Event Monitoring

- In depth monitoring of all relevant Exchange events in the Event log
- Smart defaults set for midsized businesses to cut down the “noise” of alerts
- In-line tasks to click and remotely fix issues
- Approximately 1700 rules for individual events are available
- Most event rules provide associated knowledge to assist in understanding and resolving a problem without being an expert
- Knowledge text also links to Exchange support site for up-to-date information on problems

Outlook clients – send/receive

- Uses Messaging Template to create Exchange Messaging service
- Adds Outlook Perspective Group instance to Clients component
- Receive “Outlook clients unable to receive mail” alert
- Detect Exchange Messaging service shows Red state
- Uses Exchange Messaging service to identify probable cause
- Review alert details and knowledge.
- Use “Mount Exchange Store” inline view to resolve.
- Detect Exchange Messaging service returns to a Green state.
- Review “Availability” and “Top Alerts” reports

State View of Exchange

- Monitor service health (state view) so you know if your Exchange server is on line
- Synthetic MAPI transaction detects a failure which affected the Exchange server’s health state
- User alerted and drills down using the Diagram View
- Operator pivots from Diagram View to Alert View to review alert generated for Exchange server

Unified Messaging View

- Associate all Exchange Messaging related components into a single Messaging Service View
- View the Exchange Application itself along with all other related managed objects such as storage, Active Directory, Networking, and client views
- Health status of related component roll up into the overall Exchange Messaging View
- Easily identify problem areas, understand impact to the Messaging Service and drill down quickly to diagnose and troubleshoot  
- Provides Self-Tuning Threshold monitors, which  collect a metric over a defined period of time and  “learns” a baseline for this metric
-  Baselines range of normal working conditions is computed and used as a reference for “normal operations”  and an alert is generated once a metric is outside of its baseline
- Possible to implement a “zero-configuration” threshold monitor to monitor an event like SMTP Queue length
- No longer necessary to fine tune thresholds manually for each Exchange deployment 

Mail flow monitoring

- Allows you to define a set of Sending and Receiving Exchange servers
- Administrators can define the critical path for e-mail flow within their Exchange deployment
- E-mails are periodically bounced between sender and receiver
- A health monitor ensures that e-mails are received within a defined acceptable timeframe
- Delivery Time for each transaction is collected and can be displayed in reports

Availability and Configuration

- Health modeling enables Availability Reports from Exchange Sites to individual servers, down to components on each server.
- Configuration Change Reports which track key configuration changes on each Exchange server
- Overlay reports: Visualize changes in configuration on a timeline.

Exchange Performance Reports

- The Exchange MP collects a comprehensive list of Exchange and OS related metrics
- Collected Performance Data is available in the Essentials 2007 console as well as via reports 

Essentials 2007 provides a single interface providing access to all elements of the solution including machine the computers, deploying software and patches, viewing software and hardware inventory. Essentials gives intuitive access to common actions via context sensitive options as well as wizard based tools for tasks such as deployment of software and patches.

 

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