2003 Exchange Maintenance Operations

To ensure that Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 runs efficiently and with minimal downtime, you must gather enough information to establish a baseline for the performance of your server. By gathering the appropriate information, you can proactively manage your Exchange Server 2003 messaging system and perform trend analysis and capacity planning. You must create a baseline when you first deploy your server and then re-create the baseline any time a change in hardware or workload occurs, such as a significant change in the number of users. 

You can use the HTTP Monitoring Service (HTTPMon), a Windows Server Resource Kit tool, to monitor Web sites and applications. HTTPMon provides reports about the availability and response time of Web sites and applications. HTTPMon can also simultaneously check several Web sites and applications and report the results to a log file in comma-separated value (.csv) format or in the Windows Exchange 2003 event log.

You can install HTTPMon from the resource kit by running Setup.exe from the \apps\httpmon folder of the resource kit. After you install HTTPMon, you must run HTTPMon Configuration Manager to configure the service. HTTP Configuration Manager lets you configure global settings for your organization and add the Outlook Web Access servers you want to monitor. You can use the Services MMC to start the HTTP Monitoring Service. After your tests start running, you should review the .csv files for response codes, time taken by the sample to return the text, and for the number of retry attempts made by HTTPMon. You can analyze this data to detect problems with your Outlook Web Access servers, and you can review the events logged by HTTPMon in Event Viewer.