Since email is essential in the world of business, you will want to have a smooth email sending and receiving process. And any downtime, delays, or non-delivery of your emails can negatively impact your business operations. Hence, monitoring the efficiency of your Exchange server is important to ensure messages and information can freely flow in your organization and to your customers and clients. But how to do that? Let’s discuss what an Exchange server is and the kind of monitoring it requires, and the best Exchange monitoring tools in the market.
What is Microsoft Exchange Server?
Exchange Server is a calendaring and mailing server developed by Microsoft. It offers efficient mailing services for businesses and makes it easy and secure to exchange files. It offers clean navigation controls, powerful applications, and an excellent GUI that’s easy to use, robust, reliable, and high-performing. Microsoft Exchange Server runs on Windows OS, and you have the option to self-host it or deploy it on-premises. Many businesses use Exchange Server in their internal communication, and if you want to ensure the process runs smoothly, you must continuously monitor and track the server for its performance, functionality, security, and availability, like other servers. Although the Exchange server’s own configuration and administration dashboard are capable of performing the monitoring well, it’s not the best way to go about it, especially if you have other, better solutions in the market. These solutions are Exchange monitoring tools that offer enhanced monitoring, tracking, and security capabilities. Let’s understand what those are.
What are Exchange Server Monitoring Tools?
Exchange server monitoring tools are software designed to enhance monitoring and tracking capabilities for your Microsoft Exchange servers. These tools come with many features and benefits to streamline your entire monitoring process. So, when you search for Exchange server monitoring tools, look out for these features:
An intuitive interface to manage all the server activities and users, spot issues quickly, and solve them faster and easier.Useful features like alerts and notifications delivered via SMS or email during errors, failures, and network outagesSecurity functionality such as visibility on all users, changes, and the option to modify access permissions to secure against data breachCompliance with regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, etc. applicable to your region or countryCustomizable reports to view all the records and spot anomalies, and prepare for auditsDeployability on both cloud and on-premisesReasonable pricingFree trial to know how it works before you pay for it
Now, let’s look at some of the best Exchange server monitoring tools in the market.
ManageEngine Applications Manager
Monitor your Exchange Server’s performance using the Exchange monitor by ManageEngine Applications Manager. It provides in-depth and accurate insights into your mail server’s performance and health through timely alerts during downtime. This Exchange server monitoring solution will help ensure the Exchange Server runs smoothly and remains stable. It will also allow you to simultaneously measure disk and memory utilization to maximize uptime and optimize the server performance. You will be able to keep an eye on different services running on the Exchange Server and their status and trace the response times of all the LDAP requests associated with the Exchange server’s Active Directory domain controllers. Furthermore, the monitoring tool supports Exchange server monitoring for multiple server roles such as Client Access, Hub Transport, mailbox, Edge Transport, and Unified Messaging. In addition, it can collect information about all the server roles available, performance counters for every server role, and various Exchange services.
Mailbox: You can monitor your public databases and mailbox and diagnose issues in messaging data. you can check for inactive mailboxes and maximize your mailbox database to its fullest through performance counters.Client Access: Diagnose Outlook connectivity quickly with your clients by calculating the number of requests in a second, response times, etc. in Outlook web access counters.Unified Messaging: Track the access performance of integrated dial-ins and monitor your voicemails, emails, calendar data, contacts, and faxes. Ensure all emails and voice messages are delivered quickly by detecting and fixing mailbox access failures, rejected incoming calls, directory access failures, and other issues with the help of messaging counters.Edge and Hub Transport: Monitor scan time, blocked recipients, rejected scan requests, etc. to ensure security from spam and viruses. You can also check the server loads with loss assessment counters, edge synchronization counters, and queue length counters.
Moreover, the Applications Manager supports PowerShell to make the monitoring process easier with details like database size, space occupied and left, etc to manage the data. You will also get to use an intuitive dashboard to manage everything and gain in-depth analytics.
Paessler
Use Paessler PRTG for Exchange monitoring and get effortless email delivery. It will help you monitor your Exchange Server’s performance and availability and ensure all your emails deliver smoothly. Setting up PRTG is easy with simple steps and a few clicks. You will be given Exchange servers during auto-discovery and installation. Just configure PRTG’s round trip sensors to continuously monitor how emails are sent and received and ensure no delays occur for achieving uninterrupted operations. After configuring, create an in-depth monitoring process for your Exchange Server by designating the server as a device in PRTG. You can do this by indicating its DNS name or IP address and adding the sensor for monitoring. Even if you encounter issues in exchanging emails, the sensors will provide some idea of possible causes. It will also notify you during malfunctions with real-time, automatic alerts. You can visualize all the monitoring data, web servers, SQL servers, and other software and hardware by adding sensors to a central dashboard. Another fascinating thing about PRTG is that its PowerShell sensors such as Exchange Mailbox Sensor, Database Sensor, Backup Sensor, Mail Queue Sensor, etc. will enable you to customize the monitoring to easily adapt to your hardware. Try PRTG absolutely free for 30 days.
Enow
Enow is a proactive Exchange monitoring and reporting tool that will enable you to quickly manage all your critical components. With this award-winning solution, you can view your entire Exchange environment from a single place. The tool can automatically verify messaging services like external and internal mail flow, client access, database availability and performance, system functioning and capacity, and more. It will provide a visual way to perform Exchange monitoring and a faster way to detect and isolate issues. You will get namespace-specific monitoring, client load on all protocols, and protocol tests to ensure client access and monitor network quality and connectivity. In the event of any mishap, Enow will send automatic alerts so you can take appropriate actions on time. Moreover, ENow’s monitoring solution can map end-user experience, even from a remote location so that you can quickly isolate issues and understand the root cause. It is easy to install on any device, without requiring a technical team. You can leverage customizable, out-of-the-box reports such as message and mailbox reports, server reports, client access reports, and storage and usage reports to suit your needs. You can also customize your dashboard according to your preference. Try its free trial today.
SolarWinds
Ensure the best server performance using SolarWinds’s Exchange Monitor and enable faster troubleshooting. It’s designed to let you monitor and determine your mailbox’s overall capacity constraints using an easy-to-use dashboard to view data size, transaction log size, volume usage, file size, and more. This tool will help you analyze each mailbox detail to determine if you can move a large mailbox to a different database and maintain load balance capacity. It can also gather accurate stats about all the capacity issues to ease troubleshooting using real-time and historical Exchange server performance. Thus, you can fix issues before the users can notice a thing. You will get continuous Exchange Server monitoring to bypass mail storms coming from applications, large email names, etc. Using the tool will let you track each aspect of your Exchange Server, including the mailbox server, hub, edge transport server, the CAS, etc. SolarWinds Exchange monitoring solution comes with an intuitive interface so that you can spot issues quickly, go through user details, and view the size and number of mailbox attachments, mail trends, mailbox synchronized devices, and more. This data will help you report on mailbox details of users to easily clean up the database and enhance performance. Take a 30-day free trial to know more.
LogicMonitor
LogicMonitor offers an excellent Exchange monitoring solution by tracking your server performance metrics. It will help you determine mailbox capacity constraints, Exchange queues, user activities, connections, etc. You can create a dashboard to display critical information about the Exchange server useful for IT operations. The automatic monitoring and detection solution helps reduce the deployment time using out-of-the-box dashboards to gain insights into the entire environment. With proper monitoring of connections and queues, you can identify bottlenecks early such as spam, performance degradation, blockages, etc. In addition, dynamic thresholds will alert you upon detecting an anomaly and not rely on rule-based alert thresholds. Ensure your Windows services belonging to the Exchange server are available all the time by monitoring and tracking them. LogicMonitor can meet all your Exchange server requirements whether you run it on the cloud or on-premises. This hybrid coverage will ease your organization’s transition to the new environment. Using the LogicMonitor Collector, you can test the performance and status of mail services. It can also test the latency and status of SMTP service, IMAP service, and message store. Moreover, setting up LogicMonitor is effortless; just type your server’s hostname and allow the software to automatically handle the rest. This will come to you easily without spending days or hours learning to become a monitoring expert.
eG Innovations
Using the Exchange monitoring solution by eG Innovations, you can perform proactive monitoring and easily troubleshoot issues. This solution has specialized Exchange monitoring capabilities to ensure your email systems exhibit top performance. eG Innovations’ Exchange monitoring tool can safeguard your critical business services. It can help you manage your server performance effectively and easily using an agentless or agent-based approach to monitoring for aspects like:
Users’ access patternsInstantaneously occupancy of Exchange server queuesInteraction between the Active Directory and the Exchange server
The unique layered representation of eG Enterprise offers an efficient and intuitive way of correlating application performance with CPU, memory, disk performance, and network. This way, administrators can quickly interpret performance bottlenecks. eG agents store data in the eG enterprise, hence, you can perform historical analysis and find how to configure the server to achieve optimal performance. Furthermore, eG enterprise can determine whether the client requests are reaching the Exchange server and if their response times are acceptable. It will also verify whether the RPC requests of MAPI clients have queued for processing at the Exchange server as well as changes in RPC requests’ processing rate. In addition, indicate any server slowdowns or malfunctions, queue build-ups between Microsoft IIS and the Exchange store, attempted retries for mail delivery, critical errors in the server in event logs, configuration correctness, and more. Plus, eG Enterprise can perform:
Process monitoring: to check risks and memory/CPU capacityMail traffic monitoring: to determine server workload, unusual increment in mail traffic activities, peak times, and the number of users connected during this timeNetwork monitoring: to detect congestion issues and queue requests on the server host’s (a system hosting the Exchange server) network interface.Memory monitoring: to find free memory in the server host and excessive page errorsDisk monitoring: to find host bottlenecks, requests received in the host’s disks, slower read/writes, and load balancing.CPU monitoring: to determine CPU usageActive Directory Monitoring: to check if there were any interactions between the Active Directory server and the Exchange server.
Take the free trial to know more.
Nagios
The popular monitoring platform, Nagios, provides an efficient Exchange monitoring solution to businesses. It will help you monitor your mail servers including protocol availability, server statistics, and server availability. Implementing this monitoring solution offers many benefits, such as:
Detecting email server delays and failures fasterDetecting protocol failures and network outages fasterIncreased server, application, and services availability
There are two options you can go for – Nagios Core and Nagios XI based on your monitoring needs.
Nagios XI: It is a trustable and very powerful infrastructure monitoring solution. It has helped thousands of businesses and users from small businesses to the Fortune 500 in their monitoring needs. It offers robust features, performance, visibility, and customizability and is yet easy to use. It has a free trial option and pricing starts at $1,995.Nagios Core: It is an open-source monitoring and alerting tool with industry-grade capabilities. It will allow you to monitor your infrastructure components such as network protocols, system metrics, servers, Network infrastructure, applications, and services. It’s free.
No matter which one you use, you will get immediate alerts during failures, errors, and outages so that you can quickly fix them and keep your systems running optimally. You will also get comprehensive reporting with historical records of events, alert response availability, outages, notifications, etc. You can even leverage capacity planning graphs and trending reports to identify issues faster.
Netwrix
Netwrix offers continuous Microsoft Exchange monitoring to help you spot issues, fix them, and run your business smoothly. Using this solution, you will get a complete view of critical changes in your systems like modified mailbox sizes, SMTP rules, etc. to make quick remediation. Netwrix’s monitoring software will allow you to visualize all the people who have accessed your mailbox, the IP address of the system making the access attempt, items viewed, things deleted or edited, and so on for faster response and divert a possible data breach. In addition, you can manage access permissions effortlessly by viewing who can access what and making suitable decisions. By reviewing access right periodically and revoking excessive permissions, you can eliminate PR nightmares and lower data exposure. It will also send automatic notifications of unexpected events to enable better security. You can view every anomalous activity, risk metrics, etc, to make faster and better remediation decisions. You will get Blind Spot analysis as well as user behavior analysis to detect threats and learn the issues quickly before a data breach happens. It will also help you find the root cause of issues faster and sort audit data and streamline search criteria. You can customize reports to accelerate future investigations. Netwrix’s intuitive dashboard will let you clearly spot changes, users making those changes, and perform the necessary actions. It’s compliant with regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA, SOX, PCI DSS, FISMA/NIST, and GLBA to help pass audits faster. You can easily integrate this solution with your infrastructure using its RESTful API and download it anywhere, cloud or on-premises. There’s a 20-day free trial available.
Conclusion
Exchange server monitoring tools will make it easy for you to monitor your Exchange server, detect issues, and resolve them faster. This way, you can ensure smooth data flow between your business and customers while enhancing network, system, and data security. Thus, choose the best Exchange server monitoring tool based on the features you will use, your budget, and your requirements. You may also explore some top tools to monitor Windows servers.
