Exchange 2007 Mailbox Role Counters (Advanced)

This SAM application monitor templatecontains advanced performance and statistics counters for monitoring Exchange 2007 Mailbox Role. Some of the counters may require manual configuration, such as setting up installation-specific instances, correcting thresholds for the client’s environment, and so forth. Use this template in addition to the Exchange 2007 Mailbox Role Services and Counters (Basic) template.

Prerequisites

RPC and WMI access to the Exchange server.

Credentials

Windows Administrator on the target server.

Component monitors

These performance counters are based on the following information:

Monitoring Mailbox Servers: Exchange 2007 Help, "Microsoft TechNet":
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb201689(EXCHG.80).aspx

Messages Sent/sec

Shows the rate that messages are sent to transport.

Used to determine current messages sent to transport.

Directory Access: LDAP Reads/sec

Shows the current rate that the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) reads occur while processing requests for the client.

Used to determine the current LDAP read rate per protocol.

Directory Access: LDAP Searches/sec

Shows the current rate that the LDAP searches occur while processing requests for the client.

Used to determine the current LDAP search rate per protocol.

User Count (Information Store)

Shows the number of users connected to the information store.

Used to determine current user load.

% Processor time (Exchange Search)

Shows the amount of processor time that is currently being consumed by the Exchange Search service.

Should be less than 1% of overall CPU typically and not sustained above 5%.

% Processor Time (msftefd)

Shows the amount of processor time that is being consumed to update content indexing within the store process.

Should be less than 10% of what the store process is during steady state.

Full crawls will increase overall processing time, but should never exceed overall store CPU capacity. Check throttling counters to determine if throttling is occurring due to server performance bottlenecks.

Throttling Delay Value

Shows the total time, in milliseconds, a worker thread sleeps before it retrieves a document from the Microsoft Exchange Information Store service. This is set by the throttling monitor thread.

Indicates the current throttling delay value. If this value is nonzero, this indicates a potential server bottleneck causing delay values to be introduced to throttle the rate at which indexing is occurring.

In the instance field, you can specify your own mailbox database or use the default value. Use perfmon.exe to determine the name of the instance. Default value: instance=_total.

% Processor Time (Mailbox Assistants)

Shows the amount of processor time that is being consumed by mailbox assistants.

Should be less than 5% of overall CPU capacity.

Average Event Processing Time in Seconds

Shows the average processing time of the events chosen.

Should be less than 2 at all times.

In the instance field, you can specify your own mailbox database or use the default value. Use perfmon.exe to determine the name of the instance. Default value: instance=msexchangemailboxassistants-total.

Average Resource Booking Processing Time

Shows the average time to process an event in the Resource Booking Attendant.

Should be a low value at all times. High values may indicate a performance bottleneck.

Requests Failed (resource booking)

Shows the total number of failures that occurred while the Resource Booking Attendant was processing events.

Should be 0 at all times.

Average Calendar Attendant Processing time

Shows the average time to process an event in the Calendar Attendant.

Should be a low value at all times. High values may indicate a performance bottleneck.

Requests Failed (calendar attendant)

Shows the total number of failures that occurred while the Calendar Attendant was processing events.

Should be 0 at all times.

Information Store: RPC Requests

Indicates the overall RPC requests that are currently executing within the information store process.

Should be below 70 at all times.

The maximum value in Exchange 2007 is 500 RPC requests that can execute at any designated time before the information store starts rejecting any new connections from clients.

Information Store: RPC Averaged Latency

Indicates the RPC latency, in milliseconds, averaged for all operations in the last 1,024 packets. For information about how clients are affected when overall server RPC averaged latencies increase, see “Understanding Client Throttling” at: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=116695.

Should not be higher than 25 ms on average.

To determine if certain protocols are causing overall RPC latencies, monitor MSExchangeIS Client (*)\RPC Average Latency to separate latencies based on client protocol. Cross-reference MSExchangeIS\RPC Client Backoff/sec to ensure higher latencies are not causing client throttling.

Information Store: RPC Client Backoff/sec

Shows the rate that the server notifies the client to back off. Indicates the rate at which client backoffs are occurring. Higher values may indicate that the server may be incurring a higher load resulting in an increase in overall averaged RPC latencies, causing client throttling to occur. This can also occur when certain client user actions are being performed. Depending on what the client is doing and the rate at which RPC operations are occurring, it may be normal to see backoffs occurring.

Database: Database Page Fault Stalls/sec

Shows the rate that database file page requests require of the database cache manager to allocate a new page from the database cache.

This should be 0 at all times.

If this value is nonzero, this indicates that the database is not able to flush dirty pages to the database file fast enough to make pages free for new page allocations.

Database: Log Record Stalls/sec

Shows the number of log records that cannot be added to the log buffers per second because the log buffers are full. If this counter is nonzero most of the time, the log buffer size may be a bottleneck.

The average value should be below 10 per second.

Spikes (maximum values) should not be higher than 100 per second.

Database: Version buckets allocated

Shows the total number of version buckets allocated.

Should be less than 12,000 at all times.

The maximum default version is 16,384. If version buckets reach 70 percent of maximum, the server is at risk of running out of the version store.

Database Cache Size (MB)

Shows the amount of system memory, in megabytes, used by the database cache manager to hold commonly used information from the database files to prevent file operations. If the database cache size seems too small for optimal performance and there is little available memory on the system (check the value of Memory/Available Bytes), adding more memory to the system may increase performance. If there is ample memory on the system and the database cache size is not growing beyond a certain point, the database cache size may be capped at an artificially low limit. Increasing this limit may increase performance.

Maximum value is RAM-2GB (RAM-3GB for servers with sync replication enabled). This and Database Cache Hit % are extremely useful counters for gauging whether a server's performance problems might be resolved by adding more physical memory.

Use this counter along with store private bytes to determine if there are store memory leaks.

Note: Set the thresholds as appropriate for your environment.

Average Document Indexing Time

Shows the average, in milliseconds, of how long it takes to index documents.

Should be less than 30 seconds at all time.

Note: In the instance field, you can specify your own mailbox database or use the default value. Use perfmon.exe to determine the name of the instance. Default value: instance=_total.

Events in queue

Shows the number of events in the in-memory queue waiting to be processed by the assistants.

Should be a low value at all times. High values may indicate a performance bottleneck.

Note: In the instance field, you can specify your own mailbox database or use the default value. Use >perfmon.exe to determine the name of the instance. Default value: instance=msexchangemailboxassistants-total.

RPC Latency average (msec)

Shows the average latency, in milliseconds, of RPC requests. The average is calculated over all RPCs since exrpc32 was loaded.

Should be less than 100 ms at all times.

Failed Submissions Per Second

Shows the number of failed submissions per second.

Should be 0 at all times.