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Topper
for Exchange Management can conduct round the clock monitoring of your
Exchange network and alert you to any abnormal situations that arise.
Topper for Exchange Management includes 6 basic types of testing that
help to ensure the proper and timely functioning of your Exchange
environment
Exchange
message probing allows
Topper to perform email testing and time the delivery of electronic
mail. Email monitoring is the heart of the matter for both managerial
oversight of messaging service levels and day-to-day operations. The
email tests are actual electronic mail messages sent to specific
destinations. The electronic messages, called messaging probes, are
then immediately returned to Topper confirming that the messaging
application and its supportive hardware, software, and network
connectivity are functioning properly. If a test does not return in a
predefined period of time, alarms and notifications may be sent to the
operations staff to inform of that fact. Statistical
reports
may be generated to track and demonstrate the level of service
quality. For the vast majority of TOPPER users, this type of testing
is the reason why TOPPER was chosen. For Microsoft Exchange probing,
an account on an Exchange server acts as our entry point into the
Exchange world. From there TOPPER can send through your Exchange
environment. It does this by sending a probe to the System Attendant
id at the other Exchange server requesting a confirmation of delivery
back to TOPPER. It can also send probes to other mail systems or the
Internet to check the availability of those systems
Performance
Objects - Topper
can monitor the overall health of any NT or Exchange performance
object (a performance counter registered with NT by either the
operating system or any software/hardware vendor). TOPPER enables you
to set up continuous monitoring of these objects tailored for your own
environment. Each performance object is configured such in a fashion
that makes sense (i.e., for disk space, an absolute set of thresholds
are configured whereas for CPU utilization, thresholds would be
specified over time.
This unique configuration scheme helps ensure that alerts make sense
and eliminates the possibility of false alerts. As with other TOPPER
testing, once an alert situation is uncovered, a notification is sent
to the appropriate staff
Windows and
Exchange Services - Topper has
the ability to monitor each critical service on your server and
attempt to restart if Topper detects the service is not running. If
TOPPER cannot restart the service, it will generate an alert to notify
the appropriate staff
Exchange
Performance Sets -
Performance sets are pre-configured groups of performance objects that
may be copied and used to monitor multiple servers with a common set
of monitoring points. Topper for Exchange Management comes with a
pre-configured set of performance objects that will monitor the basic
underlying NT performance objects (CPU utilization, Disk utilization
etc.) and additionally will monitor Exchange specific performance
objects such as MTA processes, work queues, and connectors
Event Log Filtering - Topper can filter Windows Event Log events in real-time to help uncover problems as they occur.
The NT Event Logs store individual status records about processes and
services running on NT workstations and servers. An Event is actually a
status record written by some process running on the PC providing status
and diagnostic information
On an NT 4.0 computer
there are three event logs
- System Events
- Application
Events
- Security
Events
Windows 2000 & 2003 has
added three additional Event Logs,
- Directory
Services
- DNS Server Log
- File
Replication Service Log
Each of these
logs can be filtered against two types of criteria:
Each event in the logs
has been categorized by the providing vendor and classified as either a Warning
or Error.
These can be automatically captured by Topper and mapped to Topper's Minor
and Major error conditions, and alert notification rules can be
established for each. Additionally, TOPPER provides the ability to exclude
certain of these conditions, that for your enterprise, are not considered
as important conditions to monitor against. This capability allows you to configure
filtering
in a
matter of seconds.
Secondly, for specific
errors not flagged by the vendor, a text string entry can be configured
that TOPPER will use to filter against the event logs. When a record
contains the text string, an notification will be made to the appropriate
staff.
Topper is a trademark of Bear Mountain
Software Inc.
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