Apparently, last night our Exchange server stopped receiving email until it was rebooted this morning. Everyone is up in arms. Hobbit showed nothing unusual. Does anyone have any way to monitor Exchange?
Eric Jacobs Infrastructure and Operations Information Technology Group Phone:215-682-5354 Email:ejacobs at thomaspublishing.com
What function(s) do you wish to monitor other than Services running or not?
Perl has some modules for working with SMTP.
Ray
-----Original Message----- From: Jacobs, Eric [mailto:ejacobs at thomaspublishing.com] Sent: Wednesday, October 14, 2009 4:26 PM To: hobbit at hswn.dk Subject: [hobbit] Monitoring Exchange
Apparently, last night our Exchange server stopped receiving email until it was rebooted this morning. Everyone is up in arms. Hobbit showed nothing unusual. Does anyone have any way to monitor Exchange?
Eric Jacobs Infrastructure and Operations Information Technology Group Phone:215-682-5354 Email:ejacobs at thomaspublishing.com
To unsubscribe from the hobbit list, send an e-mail to hobbit-unsubscribe at hswn.dk
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What version of Exchange? Did you determine the cause? Currently there are monitors for Database size on Deadcat.net. Not sure if there are any monitors for more specific Exchange items such as the queues, but you can monitor the services.
Dave Gilmore
-----Original Message----- From: Jacobs, Eric [mailto:ejacobs at thomaspublishing.com] Sent: Wednesday, October 14, 2009 4:26 PM To: hobbit at hswn.dk Subject: [hobbit] Monitoring Exchange
Apparently, last night our Exchange server stopped receiving email until it was rebooted this morning. Everyone is up in arms. Hobbit showed nothing unusual. Does anyone have any way to monitor Exchange?
Eric Jacobs Infrastructure and Operations Information Technology Group Phone:215-682-5354 Email:ejacobs at thomaspublishing.com
To unsubscribe from the hobbit list, send an e-mail to hobbit-unsubscribe at hswn.dk
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Re: Jacobs, Eric 2009-10-14 <E4674276443CFB4BBDE56855AF2E4A46045324A4 at tciexch2.tci.loc>
Apparently, last night our Exchange server stopped receiving email until it was rebooted this morning. Everyone is up in arms. Hobbit showed nothing unusual. Does anyone have any way to monitor Exchange?
We've got some cronjob that sends mail to an Exchange account every 5 minutes and a simple perl script using Net::IMAP checking if the last mail received is not older than some timeout. (Using Hobbit.pm from the Debian package.)
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict; use Net::IMAP::Simple::SSL; use Date::Parse; use Hobbit;
my $bb = new Hobbit ({ hostname => 'smtp.xx.com', test => 'mailping'});
sub check_imap ($$$) { my ($servername, $username, $password) = @_; my $server = new Net::IMAP::Simple::SSL ($servername);
unless ($server->login ($username, $password)) {
$bb->color_line ('red', "IMAP error: $servername: ". $server->errstr . "\n");
return;
}
my $now = time ();
my $max = 0;
my $number_of_messages = $server->select ('INBOX');
foreach my $msg ( 1..$number_of_messages ) {
my $lines = join '', @{$server->get ($msg)};
next unless $lines =~ /^Subject: ping (.*)/m;
my $time = str2time ($1);
$max = $time if $time > $max;
if ($time < $now - 7200) {
$server-> delete ($msg);
}
}
$server->quit();
my $color;
if ($max > $now - 400) {
$color = 'green';
} elsif ($max > $now - 700) {
$color = 'yellow';
} else {
$color = 'red';
}
$bb->color_line ($color, "Last ping mail at $servername was received at ".scalar (localtime ($max)) ."\n");}
check_imap ('imap.xx.com', 'hobbit', 'passwd');
$bb->send;
Christoph
cb at df7cb.de | http://www.df7cb.de/
Generally you are at least going to see an error message come across in the MSGS column if something errors/hangs on an Exchange server. Unless you have created blanket ignore rules for the MSGS column or you don't monitor and alert off of the MSGS column, you should have seen something there for 99.9% of all Exchange issues.
There are also ways to test by sending a heartbeat email and checking it via POP3 or IMAP to insure that you receive it. There are ways to insure SMTP is up, specific services are running, etc. The important thing to remember is that monitoring looks at specific components of the system. Just like in your car, you have a gauge that tells you if you are overheated, have gas, etc. but your instrument panel may not give you any indication that there is a problem if you are wedged on top of a median without any wheels touching the ground. Same thing with monitoring. You can monitor specific aspects of the system based on your design, but there is no magic bullet that is going to catch every possible scenario - especially when it comes to the complexities of email routing, etc.
Was this an issue with misconfiguration, bad patch/update, hardware failure, software crash?
-----Original Message----- From: Jacobs, Eric [mailto:ejacobs at thomaspublishing.com] Sent: Wednesday, October 14, 2009 4:26 PM To: hobbit at hswn.dk Subject: [hobbit] Monitoring Exchange
Apparently, last night our Exchange server stopped receiving email until it was rebooted this morning. Everyone is up in arms. Hobbit showed nothing unusual. Does anyone have any way to monitor Exchange?
Eric Jacobs Infrastructure and Operations Information Technology Group Phone:215-682-5354 Email:ejacobs at thomaspublishing.com
To unsubscribe from the hobbit list, send an e-mail to hobbit-unsubscribe at hswn.dk
Hi.
Is it possible to change the smtp test to go red on "Unexpected service response", instead of yellow?
/Johan
On Wednesday, 28 October 2009 10:38:30 Johan Sjöberg wrote:
Hi.
Is it possible to change the smtp test to go red on "Unexpected service response", instead of yellow?
Change the default --checkresponse option to --checkresponse=red for bbtest- net in the bbnet task in hobbitlaunch.cfg. See the man page for bbtest-net for more info.
Regards, Buchan
participants (7)
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bgmilne＠staff.telkomsa.net
-
cb＠df7cb.de
-
david＠stenhouseconsulting.com
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ejacobs＠thomaspublishing.com
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hballinger＠heritage-healthcare.com
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johan.sjoberg＠deltamanagement.se
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storerr＠nibco.com