Getting Started with ExMon

The Exchange Server User Monitor (ExMon), announced by the Exchange Server engineering group last April, lets Exchange administrators investigate and respond quickly to user complaints that "the mail system is running slowly." You can use ExMon to monitor the performance of individual Outlook client connections with the Exchange server in near real time and possibly identify heavy resource usage (e.g., excessive CPU consumption). You can also use ExMon to determine the impact of user activity on the Exchange system. ExMon is a great tool for a quick look at overall system performance (as opposed to detailed performance analysis). It relies on the Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) subsystem that Microsoft created to allow low-overhead performance analysis of Windows applications. (You can gain a basic understanding of ETW at http://blogs.msdn.com/matt_pietrek/archive/2004/09/16/230700.aspx.) To get you started with ExMon, I outline the tool's requirements and provide some guidelines about how to install and use the tool. . . .