The Exchange Mailbox server role manages the DB Store attached to them. Active and passive copies of the mailboxes spread across the DB Stores. That is why, the mailbox databases are the central point of the Microsoft Exchange Architecture. The availability of each mailbox is critical to the Database availability Group (DAG).
GSX Monitor & Analyzer main features
Role Status
White Space Threshold
DB Store Size Threshold
Real Time statistics
Reporting on Mailbox database activity
GSX Solutions helps you to do Maibox Databases Management giving you all the information required to take proactive actions.
Role Status
GSX checks the mailbox role, all the present DBs and their status. If one of the DB on the server is in error, GSX alert and reports a Role and a DB down with the name of the DB in error. Hence, real time monitoring of each DB enables the administrator to stay proactive and to fix problem before it impacts the users. The Main View also provides directly the number of mounted and dismounted copies on the server.
White Space Threshold
GSX detects the amount of Whitespace with WMI checks and alerts the admin if the amount is above a delimited threshold. This will essentially lead to compacting the DB in order to create space.
DB Store Size Threshold
GSX notifies the administrator that the DB Store reached a specific size to take action on increasing database sizes.
Real Time statistics
GSX provides several critical statistics that need to be followed at the DB level in real time:
For each server GSX provides the list of the DBs with their Content Index state, the general size, white space size, number of Mailboxes, the average Mailbox size, the last log inspection date and the last backup date (to know if maintenance process are really made).
Reporting on Mailbox database activity
Database statistics are more than just mere statistics. Server stats on their own are not what is important compared to the real-time reporting feature of the GSX mailbox database.
That is why GSX provides a set of critical statistics to report on into GSX Analyzer.
- Report on Database statistics at the DB Store Level
DB Availability: (on all copies of the DB). All the mailboxes are stored in the DB and most of the time they inherit from their characteristics (quota for example). A decrease over the time can be due to recurrent issues, network, SAN problems, etc.
Content Index Availability: If the Content Index availability decreases, this can result in serious problems such as a DB in a degraded mode, which can be very difficult to fix.
Size of the DB: Reporting on a DB size means knowing the space taken on the disk to anticipate a capacity problem. Statistics are critical in regard to the forecasting features of GSX Analyzer.
White Space DB : increasing White space means the DB is not backed up correctly and that no maintenance operation is made on the DB. That leads to critical capacity and availability problems.
Mailbox reports: Critical for sizing, capacity and control the evolution of the architecture.
Number of Mailbox and Average size of a mailbox per DB: Critical for sizing. Example: The architecture is set with 5GB quota per Mailbox. The administrator can see the evolution of the size of the mailbox and compare with the DB store quota setting. The purpose is to make capacity planning to anticipate storage purchases.
- GSX Analyzer DB Store Statistics at the server level
However, characteristics at the server level are still useful to control the balance of the load across the architecture.
Number of mailboxes and number of Mailbox Databases per server: The purpose of this ratio is to equilibrate the number of mailboxes between the DB stores and the servers. Some servers can have a small number of users, a lot of storage and some others have too many users for historical reasons. It allows the administrator to have the most accurate view and take actions.
Average mailbox size per server: Same idea that the average DB size per server. Is the reality matching with the original sizing? Is there any storage problem to anticipate on this server regarding the evolution of this statistic?
Total Disk Space usage for all Mailbox Databases (per server): Critical to make capacity planning. This statistic has to be correlated with the information GSX gives on the disk space used by the DB to detect further storage problems. GSX Analyzer Environment Health and the Forecasting features are key points to fully exploit these statistics.
- GSX Analyzer DB Store Statistics at the DAG level
To check SLAs and general availability of the services, what really matters is the DAG (Database Availability Group) that clusters all the DB into a general pool of DB Stores. Here are the statistics provided by GSX Analyzer on which administrator can easily report, compare, make trend and forecast.
- Number and % of healthy Mailbox Databases per DAG (passive copy)
- Number and % of Mounted Mailbox Databases per DAG
- Number of mailboxes per DAG and Average mailbox size per DAG
- Number of Mailbox Databases (per DAG) and Total Disk Space usage for all Mailbox Databases (per DAG)
Statistics on the number and average size of mailboxes allow controlling the sizing and making capacity planning at the DAG level, regarding the total population of users. It has to be correlated with the number of DB and the storage used for them, in order to decide if the rules in place are still relevant or not at the DAG level.
GSX links all these information with the DAG Management. More information
