The new Exchange 2010 Management Pack for OpsMgr

The new Exchange2010 MP for OpsMgr is also less noisy i.e. it includes one Correlation Engine nothing but a stand-alone Windows service. What's the purpose of this service? This service significantly reduces the number of alerts that may not require an action by the administrator that is monitoring the Exchange environment by watching the System Center Operations Manager Console.

How it reduce the Alerts?

Correlation Engine maintains the health model in memory, and process state change events to determine when to raise an alert based on the state of the system.

In the diagram above, you can see that, in response to a problem, several monitors change state, and the corresponding state change events are forwarded by the agent to the Root Management Server (RMS). Once received by the RMS, they are processed by the Correlation Engine, which may raise an alert via the RMS’s Software Development Kit (SDK) interface. This alert is then visible on the Operations Manager Console.

Another change in the MP is Alert are also classified into three categories:

1. Key Health Indicator (KHI) = Represent critical issues and mostly alerts fall into this category. for example, "A mailbox database is dismounted."
2. Non Service Impacting (NSI) = Critical but impact will be on one or group of users or objects. Examples issues that affect specific mailbox user not for entire organization.
3. Forensic = Monitors diagnostics that may not represent a specific problem but may be helpful while troubleshooting an issue.

Also the Reporting feature has been changed significantly. For example:

• The reporting about Mail flow statistics is based on message tracking logs.
• Service-oriented reporting includes uptime measures for application/feature i.e. Service oriented, not the server itself. Now IT admin can easily maintain the service oriented log and can easily evaluate the SLA for customers.
• Availability reporting is Exchange aware

You can download the Exchange Server 2010 Management Pack from here.  This MP includes rules and scripts to monitor and report on performance, availability, and reliability of all Exchange 2010 server roles including.

• Mailbox Server Role
• Client Access Server Role
• Hub Transport Server Role
• Edge Transport Server Role
• Unified Messaging Server Role