Exchange 2010 Mailbox Role Counters (Advanced)

This SAM template contains advanced performance and statistics counters for monitoring Exchange 2010 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 2010 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:

% Processor Time (Exchange Search)

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

Should be less than 1% of overall CPU typically and not sustained above 5%. Should be less than 10% of what the store process is during steady state.

% Processor Time (Mailbox Assistant)

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

Should be less than 5% of overall CPU capacity.

If service Exchange Mailbox Assistant is down, this counter should be ignored.

Requests Failed (Resource Booking Attendant)

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

Should be 0 at all times.

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.

RPC Requests outstanding

Shows the current number of outstanding RPC requests.

Should be 0 at all times.

RPC Requests failed (%)

Shows the percentage of failed requests in the total number of RPC requests. Failed means the sum of failed with error code plus failed with exception.

Should be 0 at all times.

Hub Servers In Retry

Shows the number of Hub Transport servers in retry mode.

Should be 0 at all times.

RPC Client Backoff/sec

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.

Messages Delivered/sec

Shows the rate that messages are delivered to all recipients. Indicates current message delivery rate to the store.

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.

Messages Sent/sec

Shows the rate that messages are sent to transport. Used to determine current messages sent to transport.

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.

User Count

Shows the number of users connected to the information store.

Used to determine current user load.

Mailboxes Processed/sec

Shows the rate of mailboxes processed by time-based assistants per second.

Determines current load statistics for this counter.

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

Events Polled/sec

Shows the number of events polled per second.

Determines current load statistics for this counter.

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

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.

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 for a long period of 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.

If I/O log write latencies are high, check for RAID5 or synchronize replication on log devices.

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% 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 (MB), used by the database cache manager to hold commonly used information from the database files to prevent file operations.

Maximum value is RAM-2GB (RAM-3GB for servers with sync replication enabled).

This and Database Cache Hit % are 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. 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.

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 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=_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.

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 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.

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.

Client: RPCs Failed:Server Too Busy/sec

Shows the client-reported rate of failed RPCs (since the store was started) due to the server too busy ROC error.

Should be 0 at all times.

Higher values may indicate RPC threads are exhausted or client throttling is occurring for clients running versions of Outlook earlier than Office Outlook 2007.