Exchange Server EKG

eIQnetworks MailAnalyzer 3.6
eIQnetworks MailAnalyzer works with Exchange, Lotus Domino, and Sendmail. This tool offers a respectable set of reports about email traffic but is much weaker than the other candidates when it comes to reporting about storage or Exchange-specific data.

MailAnalyzer collects message-tracking logs from Exchange by using an agent that you install on each Exchange server. The agent imports logs every 30 minutes, so MailAnalyzer reports fairly current data. The agent is optional, but if you choose not to use it, you must manually import logs through the product's Web-based interface.

This Web-based UI is CGI-based and runs on Microsoft IIS. The product stores data in a MySQL database and lets you run reports from the Web-based UI, as Figure 2 shows. Mail-Analyzer has its own account database, so you'll need to create accounts and passwords for each user. You can choose from three levels of account access. The access level determines which administrative functions a user can access but doesn't let you limit which reports the user can run.

MailAnalyzer provides good traffic-analysis data but limited storage or Exchange-specific data. For example, the product reports mailbox sizes but not the size of Exchange stores or how close they are to filling up the disk. It reports chargeback calculations according to the number of messages sent or received and even summarizes the data according to department or connector but doesn't calculate chargebacks according to mailbox size. The traffic data wasn't lacking, but neither was it spectacular. MailAnalyzer can report data regarding common keywords in the subject line of messages sent to the Internet but doesn't let you specify a custom keyword for which to search.

MailAnalyzer is best suited for email administrators who need a traffic-reporting tool that works with multiple email server platforms. If you run an Exchange-only shop, you'll likely be happier with one of the other tools.

e-nspect2000
e-nspect2000 takes a different approach to reporting than do the other tools I reviewed. The product collects a more limited variety of data than the other products and does a limited amount of processing, but it collects data continuously rather than on a schedule, so you always see the most up-to-date information. e-nspect2000 developer Mike Dilworth told me that many of his larger customers use the product primarily to collect data about email sent to and from Exchange, then write their own queries against the product's database to develop custom reports.

e-nspect2000 operates as an agent on each Exchange server. The agent sends data about sent and received messages to a SQL Server repository. The product provides access to message data through an MMC snap-in called Client Tools. This snap-in (which Figure 3 shows), displays the date and time, subject, sender, recipient, size, and number of attachments for each message. The product also provides summaries of various data, such as messages sent to external domains or the number of attachments according to file extension.

Client Tools organizes messages in various ways. You can view messages by individual user, or you can view summaries by Exchange server or SMTP virtual server. In addition to listings of messages, e-nspect-2000 provides graphs of traffic by the number and size of messages and the number and size of attachments over various predefined periods of time (e.g., the past month, the past 24 hours). You can print each view or save it as HTML, comma-separated value (CSV), or tab-separated value (TSV).

e-nspect2000 was too limited in its data-view options for me to recommend it over more-robust alternatives. However, this tool shines at reporting current data (and didn't even require slow MAPI queries to do so). If you're looking for a real-time Exchange traffic-monitoring tool or a way to collect Exchange data for a custom reporting solution, take a look at e-nspect2000.