Overview

Management and monitoring tools are required to perform data collection and health monitoring of Exchange components, including the hardware, operating system, Exchange processes, and supporting software. The Microsoft Windows and Exchange products come complete with all tools necessary to manage the Exchange environment. Many corporations successfully manage their Exchange environment using the standard Microsoft tools; however, the standard tools leave plenty of room for extension by third-party products, and many companies have augmented the standard tools with additional third-party products.

This chapter describes some of the standard Microsoft tools used for managing Exchange, as well as commonly used third-party products. Regardless of the set of tools selected to manage the Exchange environment, it is highly desirable where reasonable and cost-effective to use the same tools at all locations. This will allow the operational groups to leverage invested development and training time, share knowledge and skills, and provide backup for one another.

Using a common set of tools at all locations also will help to minimize the number of agents and agent processes needed on the Exchange servers.

Limiting the number of agents and agent processes will reduce server load, demand on the network, system complexity, and the risk for undesirable interaction between components.

3.1 Microsoft Management Console

The primary tool used for managing Windows server and many layered products, including Exchange, is the Microsoft Management Console (MMC). MMC is automatically installed as part of Windows server and provides a framework for creating product-specific administrative tools, commonly known as MMC...