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.