Procedures related to post-deployment operation

Article
02/09/2024

Applies to: Exchange Server 2013

This article contains the procedures that you can use as a reference when managing the Exchange Server 2013 Management Pack. For procedures related to deployment, see Procedures related to deployment.

View Exchange 2013 Management Pack monitors

For each Exchange server, only the monitors that are applicable to the roles installed are enabled. For a complete list of the monitors available in Exchange Server 2013 Management Pack, see Appendix A: Exchange health sets. Follow the steps in this article to see the monitors currently enabled on an Exchange server.

Your user account needs to be a member of the Operations Manager Administrators role to perform this procedure.

Sign in your System Center Operations Manager server and open the System Center Operations Manager console.
In the Operations Console, select Monitoring.
Expand Microsoft Exchange Server 2013, and then select Server Health.
Right select on one of the Exchange servers listed and select Open, Health Explorer.
By default, the view is scoped to unhealthy child monitors. Select on Filter Monitors to clear the filter.
Expand Entity Health to view the following four key dependency monitors for Exchange Server 2013:
- Customer Touch Points
- Key Dependencies
- Server Resources
- Service Components
Expand any of these monitors to view a list of the monitors that apply to that Exchange Server.

Create overrides

Exchange Server 2013 management pack is designed to be simple to deploy and use. It's engineered to scale with your environment, and in most cases no other configuration changes are required once you import it. However, if you see alerts that aren't valuable to you, you can configure overrides to turn off these specific alerts. Use these overrides only if you're experiencing specific problems.

Enable or disable monitors

Depending on your needs, you might want to disable or enable specific alerts within the System Center Operations Manager console or entire health sets using the Shell. The following sections provide examples of both approaches.

Enable or disable an alert using System Center Operations Manager console

Let's say you see an alert in the Active Alerts for the Store health set on a server named Server1 and this server doesn't currently have any databases with active mailboxes on it. In this case, you might not want to get alerted for the Store health set on this server. You can still see the health of Server1 in the System Center Operations Manager console, but you aren't alerted for the Store health set.

To disable this alert in the System Center Operations Manager console:

Right select on the alert, and then select Overrides > Disable the Monitor > For the object: Server1 - Store.
In the Override Properties window, clear the checkbox for the Parameter Name Enabled.
Select a destination management pack to store the override, and select OK.

Disabling an alert in SCOM console.

Enable or disable a health set using the Shell

Let's say that you don't use the POP3 feature in your organization. You might want to disable monitoring support for that feature on your mailbox servers in your organization. You can do so using the following steps:

Start the Exchange Management Shell
First, you need to determine the list of monitors associated with the POP3 service on a Mailbox server. The list in Appendix A: Exchange health sets shows that the health set associated with POP3 service on a mailbox server is POP.Protocol. You need to run the Get-MonitoringItemIdentity cmdlet to get a list of all monitors associated with the POP.Protocol health set. The following command returns all monitoring items for POP.Protocol health set and stores them in the temporary variable $POPMonitoringItems.

The command uses a Mailbox server to get this list as the POP.Protocol health set isn't present on a server that doesn't have the Mailbox role installed.
```
$POPMonitoringItems = Get-MonitoringItemIdentity -Identity POP.Protocol -Server Mailbox1
```
The $POPMonitoringItems contains all monitoring items, which includes probes, monitors and responders. Separate the monitors and store them in the temporary variable $POPMonitorsby running the following command:
```
$POPMonitors = $POPMonitoringItems | Where {$_.ItemType -eq "Monitor"}
```
For each of the monitors for POP.Protocol, you need to create a global override using the Add-GlobalMonitoringOverride cmdlet. Instead of creating them one by one, you can just each monitor in the $POPMonitors variable to the Add-GlobalMonitoringOverride cmdlet by running the following command:
```
$POPMonitors | Where {Add-GlobalMonitoringOverride -Item Monitor -Identity $($_.HealthSetName+"\"+$_.Name) -PropertyName Enabled -PropertyValue 0 -Duration 60
```

To verify that you correctly created the global overrides, run the following command:

Get-GlobalMonitoringOverride | Where {$_.Identity -like "*POP.Protocol*"} | Format-Table Identity, ItemType, PropertyName, PropertyValue

Modify monitoring thresholds

You also might need to modify specific thresholds for various monitor properties. For example, assume that your organization doesn't have a large internal message volume. By default, Exchange raises an alert if the internal aggregate delivery queue exceeds 250 messages for high priority messages and 500 for low priority messages. Let's assume that these thresholds are high enough that you don't get notified soon enough that there is a problem. You determine that if these queues exceed 50 and 150 messages respectively you need to get notified. You can change the corresponding thresholds by following the steps below:

Start the Exchange Management Shell.
The delivery queues are monitored by the HubTransport health set. First, you need to get the list of monitors associated with this health set that are responsible for internal delivery queues.
```
Get-MonitoringItemIdentity -Identity HubTransport -Server Mailbox1 | Where {$_.Name -like "*InternalAggregateDeliveryQueue*" -and $_.ItemType -eq "Monitor"} | Format-Table Name
```

There are two monitors for internal aggregate delivery queues: InternalAggregateDeliveryQueueLengthLowPriorityMonitor and InternalAggregateDeliveryQueueLengthHighPriorityMonitor. You then add global overrides for each monitor using the following commands:

Add-GlobalMonitoringOverride -Item Monitor -Identity HubTransport\InternalAggregateDeliveryQueueLengthLowPriorityMonitor -PropertyName MonitoringThreshold -PropertyValue 150 -Duration 60

Add-GlobalMonitoringOverride -Item Monitor -Identity HubTransport\InternalAggregateDeliveryQueueLengthHighPriorityMonitor -PropertyName MonitoringThreshold -PropertyValue 50 -Duration 60