Let’s face it, Exchange is a significant investment. Even
with the improvements made by Microsoft in Exchange 2003, which resulted in
fewer servers being absolutely required for an Exchange infrastructure, Exchange
software, hardware, storage and support can still carry a fairly hefty price
tag. With such a significant investment, many organizations may want to
undertake an ROI analysis, be able to tell how much the system is really used,
or quickly and easily determine who is hogging the mail server’s disk space. Or,
maybe you support a large Exchange infrastructure and have SLAs
to meet. Sure, you can use the Windows Performance Monitor and some of
Exchange’s built-in tools for simple monitoring. However, for more
comprehensive statistics, you should look beyond the Exchange and Windows
tools.

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One candidate for monitoring is an add-on pack for Microsoft Operations Manager
(MOM), but this requires that you have the fairly expensive MOM product up and
running, so I won’t say too much about it here.

There are a number of solutions out there from which to
choose, and all are capable to varying degrees. I’ll provide some details for
three selected products here, and provide a link to a place where you might be
able to find a solution that exactly meets the needs of your particular
organization.

  • Fortissoft Exchange
    Monitor 2.0    : Exchange Monitor 2.0 monitors all versions of Exchange
    back to 5.5 and includes the typical reports you might expect, including
    mail and public folder sizes, disk space usage, incoming/outgoing mail
    stats, and more.
  • Vyapin
    Admin Report Kit for Exchange Server     (ARKXchange):
    Monitors much of the same information, including mail traffic statistics,
    Exchange virtual servers, distributed public folder information and
    Exchange connector information.
  • Mail Access Monitor (for
    Exchange Server and a host of other systems): At only $199, this product
    provides a wealth of good information about your Exchange server without
    draining your budget. It includes single-screen traffic overviews of your
    mail, including mail load by recipient and sender, as well as looks at
    both your internal and external traffic.

Click
here if you’d like a list of a number of monitoring solutions.