Mail Server Monitoring
Despite the wide use of instant messaging technologies and social networks, plain old email messages continue to play a great role in all business domains. For some companies, unavailability of a corporate mail server is equal to the power outage in an office.
A few companies purchase corporate accounts from the hosted mail solution providers, but most still operate own mail servers in order to minimize security risks and have full control over the mail delivery process.
For those companies, mail server monitoring is a key part of an umbrella IT monitoring solution delivered by the AggreGate Network Manager.
The Manager attaches to a number of mail flow process hooks and performs a multi-perspective monitoring:
| Authenticated IMAP/POP3 monitoring. AggreGate Network Manager checks the incoming mail server operability as well as sizes and message counts of the selected mailboxes. |
| Authenticated SMTP monitoring, i.e. monitoring the outgoing mail server operability. |
| Mail round-trip monitoring. The Network Manager sends a test mail message through an SMTP server and receives it back through a POP3/IMAP server, thus checking operability and performance of the whole mail delivery process. |
| Mail server application availability and performance tracking via SNMP and WMI protocols. |
| Deep monitoring for well-known servers, including Microsoft Exchange and Postfix. |
| DNS MX record monitoring. A monitoring server performs the periodic checking of MX ("Mail eXchange") records to ensure that email routing is correctly set up at the domain level. |
| Monitoring the CPU load, memory, bandwidth usage and other KPIs of the mail server machines. |
| Out-of-the-box alerting with SMS and IM notifications upon the threshold violations and mail delivery problems. |
| Remote mail server log analysis and alerting upon the occurrence of specific error patterns. |
| Mail server error consolidation via the central storage and processing of Syslog and Windows Event Log messages. |
Deep Mail Server Internals Monitoring
AggreGate Network Manager delivers the advanced out-of-the-box analytics for widespread mail servers:
The mail server dashboards include such metrics as:
- Queue lengths
- Authentication failures and other security events
- Mail traffic details
- Active session counts
- Mail storage parameters
- Spam filtering statistics
- And more
