Monitoring Exchange 2000

Configuring Alerts, Monitors, and Notifications with ESM
Before you configure an Exchange monitor with ESM, you must select a server that will be responsible for running the monitor. If you can spare the hardware, configure a dedicated Exchange server for monitoring purposes. A production Exchange server with a large number of mailboxes shouldn't monitor itself. If the Exchange monitor runs on a production server and the server crashes or hangs, the server won't be able to send a notification message.

To configure an Exchange email notification, run ESM and click Tools, Monitoring and Status, Notifications, New Email notification. In the E-mail tab of the resulting Properties dialog box, you can choose to monitor the local server, all the servers, any server in the routing group, or a custom list of servers (among other options).

You can configure an Exchange email notification to go to one user, a set of users, or a distribution group. For the best results, use a distribution group that includes key personnel who have the necessary administrative permissions to resolve any problems that might arise. The mailboxes in the distribution group should be on different Exchange servers so that if one server has a mail-delivery problem, mailboxes on other servers will still receive any alerts. . . .