This ‘how to’ presentation describes how to monitor Microsoft Windows Exchange 2007/2010 using Opsview’s in-built Windows performance monitors and service statuses.

2. Monitoring Microsoft Exchange 2007/2010
with Opsview
Monday, 30 July 2012 © Opsview Ltd. Commercial in Confidence 2

3. About
• This ‘how to’ presentation describes how to monitor Microsoft Windows
Exchange 2007/2010 using Opsview’s in-built Windows performance
monitors and service statuses.
• If you don’t already have Opsview installed, visit our website and
download Opsview Core (free), Opsview Pro (30 day trial) or request a trial
to Opsview Enterprise.
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4. Introduction
• We can use the standard Opsview agent to monitor a plethora
of Exchange 07/10 services “out of the box”; using the built in
Windows performance monitors and service statuses.
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5. Pre-requisites
• This article assumes that the Opsview agent has been
installed onto a Windows Server 200* server running
Microsoft Exchange 2007/2010, and that the Microsoft
Exchange host (underlying Windows server) has been added
already to Opsview.
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6. Configuration
• Firstly, we will need to add our service checks we wish to run
against our Exchange server. These service checks are going to
monitor performance counters, service statuses and a few
others. Opsview ships with IMAP/SMTP checks “out of the
box”.
• In order to add our new service checks, login to your Opsview
server and navigate to “SETTINGS > SERVICE CHECKS” and
click on the green icon in the top left.
• Now we need to populate our service check template fields;
in this example we will go through adding just one service
check, however using the information in the appendix at the
bottom of this article you can add many more service checks
using the same methodology.
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7. Configuration
• In this example we are going to monitor the Exchange “Active
Mailbox Delivery” queue, so in the name we will add the title
“Exchange 2007/2010 Active Mailbox Delivery Queue” for
example.
• We can add whatever description we like in the description
field, i.e. “Monitoring to ensure that…”. In the “service
group”, we can add a new service group, i.e. “Microsoft
Exchange 2010”.
• The rest of the fields can be populated as per your
preference, i.e. how often you’d like to check/recheck etc.
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8. Configuration
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9. Configuration
• Now that the rest of the fields have been populated, we can
move onto the “plugin” and “arguments” section which are
the crux of this article.
• We need to choose the “check_nrpe” plugin, which ships with
Opsview as default, and in the arguments section we need to
add the following:
-H $HOSTADDRESS$ -c nsc_checkcounter -a ‘”MSExchangeTransport
Queues(_total)Active Mailbox Delivery Queue Length” MaxWarn=200
MaxCrit=250 ShowAll’
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10. Configuration
• We can change the arguments to whatever we like, as per the
Microsoft Exchange performance counters library here.
• Once added, click “submit”, and our new service check is
added as below:
• We can do this as many times as we desire for our numerous
service checks. We can also do it for “-c
nsc_checkservicestate” instead of “-c nsc_checkcounter”, in
terms of the command below:
-H $HOSTADDRESS$ -c nsc_checkservicestate -a ‘ShowAll
MSExchangeAB=started’
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11. Configuration
• Now that our service checks are added, we just need to
proceed to add them to our Exchange host, via “SETTINGS >
HOSTS” and click on “Exchange” or whatever the host is
called.
• Once on the host, click “MONITORS” and then find the
“Microsoft Exchange 2010” section, and click on our new
check, as below:
• Once done, scroll to the bottom of the page and click submit.
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12. Configuration
• Finally, we just need to reload the system to apply the new
service check(s) to the host. To do this, navigate to “SYSTEMS
> APPLY CHANGES” and click “RELOAD CONFIGURATION”.
And the new service checks will be up and applied.
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13. Appendix
• Here are a few examples of commands that can be used
against MS Exchange 07/10 servers:
Exchange 2007/2010 Active Delivery Queue
check_nrpe -H $HOSTADDRESS$ -c nsc_checkcounter -a
‘”MSExchangeTransport Queues(_total)Active Mailbox Delivery
Queue Length” MaxWarn=75 MaxCrit=100 ShowAll’
Exchange 2007/2010 Poison Queue Length
check_nrpe -H $HOSTADDRESS$ -c nsc_checkcounter -a
‘”MSExchangeTransport Queues(_total)Poison Queue Length”
MaxWarn=1 MaxCrit=1 ShowAll’
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14. Appendix
Exchange 2007/2010 Retry Non-Smtp Delivery Queue
check_nrpe -H $HOSTADDRESS$ -c nsc_checkcounter -a
‘”MSExchangeTransport Queues(_total)Retry Non-Smtp Delivery
Queue Length” MaxWarn=75 MaxCrit=100 ShowAll’
Microsoft Exchange 2007/2010 Anti-spam Update (Service)
check_nrpe -H $HOSTADDRESS$ -c nsc_checkservicestate -a ‘ShowAll
MSExchangeAntispamUpdate=started’
Microsoft Exchange 2007/2010 IMAP service
check_nrpe -H $HOSTADDRESS$ -c nsc_checkservicestate -a
‘ShowAll MSExchangeImap4=started’
• There are many more available on TechNet, which can be
adapted into the commands above.
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15. About Opsview
Opsview delivers a single unified view of the health of all your
distributed physical, virtual and hybrid cloud systems.
We give DevOps staff all the tools they need to get their jobs
done faster, easier and for less.
• Opsview Enterprise offers large enterprises (+100 devices) and MSPs a
certified, professionally supported network monitoring solution with enhanced
functionality such as dynamic dashboards and reports
• SMEs looking for feature-rich dashboards to monitor the performance of their on-
premise, virtualized or cloud apps choose Opsview Pro
• Opsview Core is our free, open source monitoring tool - you can test and
customize it how you want
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