Exchange Server Management and Monitoring Tools

[Editor's note: At press time, Quest Software has changed the name of its product from Foglight 3.0 for Exchange to 2MA.]

As a network administrator, your role is to ensure the smooth operation of your organization's Microsoft Exchange Server system. To confirm that the system is running, you simply ping the server every few minutes or use Performance Monitor to keep an eye on it. However, ensuring that the system is running smoothly is a bigger challenge. The Exchange Server management tools that Microsoft provides aren't helpful in determining why your message store is filling up at an exponential rate. And using these tools to create a historical trend analysis of your Exchange Server system is almost impossible.

Many products on the market claim to fill this Exchange Server management void. I tested six of the leading products: NetIQ's AppManager 3.4 for Microsoft Exchange Server, BindView's bv-Control 1.5 for Microsoft Exchange, Quest Software's Foglight 3.0 for Exchange, Hewlett-Packard's HP OpenView ManageX SMART Plug-In 4.0 for Microsoft Exchange Server, BMC Software's PATROL 3.4 for Microsoft Exchange Server, and Heroix's RoboMon 7.6 Exchange Intelligence Solution Set.

Some of the products I reviewed are tailored to Exchange Server; others offer optional configuration components that let you adapt the product to manage other applications. All the products I tested are competing for a sizable chunk of your budget.

At the functionality level, all six products are aggressively competitive. Each program offers the same core functionality: It lets you proactively monitor Exchange Server systems, and it provides analysis of the logged data.

In this review, I looked at the six products from an Exchange Server-centric perspective. The only features I tested were the products' Exchange Server monitoring and management capabilities. (Some of the products offer additional functionality, which helps explain the differences in pricing between products.)

My test bed consisted of several Windows 2000 Server machines and a handful of Win2K Professional and Windows NT Server 4.0 systems. I ran all tests on Exchange Server 5.5, and I tested features such as the products' ability to monitor, apply rule sets for server management, and collect and filter data into historical trend analysis graphs. Some vendors, such as HP and NetIQ, already offer versions of their software for Exchange 2000 Server. However, at the time of this review, most vendors' Exchange 2000-compatible applications were in beta testing.

AppManager 3.4 for Microsoft Exchange Server
AppManager has long been regarded as the premiere management tool for NT-based environments. Featuring tight integration with Windows, optional support for more than 30 server applications, and a flexible scripting language, AppManager can handle all your network-management needs. AppManager 3.4 incorporates beefed up support for backup management, more predefined policies than earlier versions, and integrated Active Directory (AD) support.

Installing AppManager's Exchange Server focused tool was fairly painless albeit slow. The program requires Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 Service Pack 1 (SP1) or later. After the setup program copied the software's files to my system, AppManager spent almost 20 minutes registering files with the system, creating a SQL Server repository, and starting, stopping, and restarting the necessary services. Of course, this process is only a one-time event, but you might want to think twice about installing AppManager during a workday.

The software employs a multi-tier client/server architecture, which makes it highly scalable. You'll probably spend most of your time working with the software's console. Each remote machine runs an agent that continuously reports back to the main server, and the heart of AppManager is its Knowledge Scripts, NetIQ's proprietary policy format. The company designed Knowledge Scripts with versatility in mind, and you can use them to passively monitor your applications or aggressively take action in the event of network problems.

AppManager includes an auto-discovery feature that NetIQ designed to probe only the machine on which you install the software. To monitor services and applications on client systems, you must install the AppManager agent on the machines. My network's core services are distributed among multiple servers; I dreaded the idea of manually installing AppManager on each machine. Fortunately, AppManager includes AgentInstall Knowledge Script, an elegant method of providing centralized agent deployment. This script works by installing itself as a client on the main AppManager server, then installing remote agents on each managed client. The script is automated, so all I had to do was provide valid usernames and Uniform Naming Convention (UNC) paths for the agents to use. A few minutes after I input this information, the script installed the appropriate agents on the remote systems. The agents then used TCP/IP to communicate with the AppManager server.

Unfortunately, NetIQ hardwired into the code the ports that AppManager uses, and I already had an application mapped to one of the ports that the software employs. Thus, I was forced to change the port number of my FTP daemon. Although this modification wasn't a major hassle, I would've appreciated the ability to define which ports AppManager uses to communicate with clients.

After I configured everything properly, I launched AppManager, which is a Microsoft Management Console (MMC) snap-in, from the MMC framework, and the software prompted me for a SQL Server login. I input the default systems administrator account and selected the proper repository. AppManager was then ready to go. Because NetIQ designed the software as an MMC snap-in, you don't have to spend much time trying to learn a new UI. As Figure 1 shows, AppManager looks like other MMC snap-ins but has a busier interface. For administrators who work on different platforms, AppManager includes a Web-based console, which lets you work with AppManager from any platform as long as you have a Web browser at your disposal.

NetIQ developers wrote AppManager's Knowledge Scripts in VBScript, which makes customization fairly simple. However, for those who aren't familiar with BASIC, AppManager includes many Knowledge Scripts.

To test AppManager's monitoring features, I created a large dummy file intended to fill up the disk space on my Exchange Server system. The software responded to the situation by sending me a warning. I made things more interesting by creating a bottleneck between a client and the Exchange Server system, which slowed the mail delivery time. AppManager had already been monitoring mail delivery, so it noticed that congestion was impeding the traffic between the Exchange Server system and the client, then notified me. Next, I killed the Exchange Server service to see how the monitoring tool would react. Not only did AppManager notice the stalled service but it reinitialized the service. AppManager includes a ServicesDown Knowledge Script that you can use to automatically restart halted services on remote systems.

AppManager's ability to generate reports doesn't disappoint. The Report Manager tool includes 18 preconfigured report types that range from connectivity data to server load statistics to mailbox information. The software generates reports from the data that the agents collect and store in the SQL Server repository.

To test the reporting features, I created a traffic report by selecting the Exchange Server Traffic option. Report Manager then browsed the SQL Server repository and created a line graph detailing the system's usage level. I selected the TopNMailboxes option to see how much space each user was consuming on the server. Again, the Report Manager dissected the repository and output a list of every user, the size of each user's mailbox, the number of messages in each mailbox, and the last logon and logoff times.

After you generate reports, you can export them to almost every file format available (e.g., Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Word, Lotus 1-2-3, HTML). However, the software lacks an option to automatically export reports as HTML documents and publish the files to Microsoft IIS; this feature would have been handy. To view reports remotely, I had to manually copy the HTML files to my IIS directory.

AppManager does what it's supposed to do—monitor systems and prevent problems from arising. AppManager will meet the needs of any administrator who works with large enterprise networks. However, the product is plagued by its price. At $2500 per console and $600 per server, AppManager is expensive to implement. If all you need is a tool to ensure that your Exchange server's performance is optimal, justifying the cost of this solution will be difficult. However, if you make the initial investment, you can integrate other AppManager network-monitoring modules without breaking the bank. If you anticipate needing a complete enterprise-management solution in the future, you can't go wrong with AppManager.

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