Monitoring Exchange 2000

The best monitoring tools for Exchange 2000 Server are third-party add-ons, but Exchange Server and Windows 2000 offer several useful monitoring tools, including Exchange System Manager (ESM) and Performance Monitor, that help get the job done. Exchange's built-in monitoring capabilities let you track virtual memory, CPU use, free hard disk space, Win2K services, SMTP queue growth, and X.400 queue growth. Let's discuss how to configure and use some of these tools to perform basic monitoring in your Exchange environment.

Tracking Mail Queues
A limitation of ESM is that it can't display a consolidated view of mail queues from multiple servers across an Exchange organization. To view an SMTP queue on a server, you must run ESM, navigate to the desired administrative group, click Servers, choose your server, and expand the Protocols container, the SMTP container, the desired Default SMTP Virtual Server container, and the Queues folder. This exercise requires several mouse clicks; checking the queues on 10 Exchange machines in different Administrative Groups might require 60 mouse clicks. . . .