Exchange Mailbox Stores Test

The Exchange store is responsible for data storage and management. It is the interface between the clients and the server running Exchange Server. There are three components of the Exchange Store, namely:

  • Storage Groups
  • Mailboxes
  • Public Folders

This test reports statistics pertaining to the Mailbox component of the Exchange store.

Target of the test : A server configured with the Mailbox role

Agent deploying the test : An internal agent

Outputs of the test : One set of results for every Exchange server process.

Configurable parameters for the test
Parameters Description

Test Period

How often should the test be executed.

Host

The IP address of the machine configured with the Mailbox server role.

Port

The port number through which the Mailbox server communicates. The default is 6001.

Measurements made by the test
Measurement Description Measurement Unit Interpretation

Active client logons

The number of clients that performed any active logons in the last ten minute interval.

Number

 

Average delivery time

This measure indicates the average time between the submission of a message to the mailbox store and the delivery to all local recipients (recipients on the same server) for the last 10 messages.

Secs

A non-zero value for this measure indicates a change in user workload.

An abnormally high value for this measure indicates inability to deliver to one or more destinations. One of the possible reasons for this can be a network failure.

Categorization count

Indicates the number of categorizations that currently exist in the mailbox store.

Number

Categorizations are created when a user creates a filtered view or performs a search. When the information store must maintain an excessive number of categorizations, performance can be affected.

Client logons

The number of clients currently logged on.

Number

This measure is a good indicator of the current user activity in the Exchange Server. This information can be used by the administrator for planning the capacity of the mail server.

Local delivery rate

Indicates the rate at which mails are delivered locally.

Mails/Sec

 

Messages queued for submission

The current number of submitted messages which are not yet processed by transport.

Number

 

Message delivery rate

Indicates the rate at which messages are delivered to all recipients.

Mails/Sec

 

Messages opened

This measure indicates the rate at which the requests to open the messages are being submitted to the information store.

Msgs/Sec

This measure shows the overall picture of user activity. An abnormally high value for this measure may indicate that the Exchange 2000 Server is overloaded.

Messages sent

This measure indicates the rate at which messages are sent to transport by the information store.

Msgs/Sec

 

Messages submitted

Indicates the rate at which mails are submitted by clients.

Msgs/Sec

 

Receive queue size

This measure shows the number of messages that are currently in the receiving queue of the information store.

Number

This measure is usually zero under normal conditions.

A non-zero value for this measure indicates that the SMTP service is choking up memory.

Search task rate

Indicates the number of search tasks created per second.

Tasks/Sec

 

Slow FindRow Rate

Indicates the rate at which the slower FindRow needs to be used in the mailbox store.

Finds/Sec

Higher values indicate applications are crawling or searching mailboxes, which is affecting server performance. These include desktop search engines, customer relationship management (CRM), or other third-party applications.

RPC average latency

Indicates the RPC latency averaged across all operations in the last 1024 packets.

Msec

This measure provides the best indication of whether counters with high database latencies are actually impacting Exchange health and client experience. Often, high RPC averaged latencies are associated with a high number of RPC requests, which should be less than 70 at all times.

The value of this measure should not be higher than 25 msecs on an average.