Exchange Mailbox Database Log Copy and Replay Monitoring

The design of the latest versions of On Premises Exchange server has been more and more close to the Cloud version. One of the major changes was the introduction of the Database Availability Groups, that are similar to the SQL server availability groups in concept and allow us to have more than one copies of a mailbox database.

This increases the availability of the mailbox service but introduces cost for the required storage.

Although storage is cheap these days, there's no need to invest much in it for Exchange since the system will recover from a failed disk (always talking about the volumes holding the database files).

However, you should always plan the hardware and system requirements using the Exchange Requirements Calculator.

A hardware, software or network event may lead to missed logs between the database copies and result in copy and/or replay queue length. Depending on the time taken to resolve the issue and restore the connectivity, you may have to resume the mailbox database copy, reseed it or most probably do nothing.

We do however need a way to monitor the copy and replay queue length!

The latest version of the CPolydorou.Exchange module - that's 2.7.0 - contains the "Monitor-MailboxDatabaseCopyLogs" function that can show the progress of the log copy and replay processes.

It can be executed against a server or a singe database and shows the number of items in each queue and the items that have been processed since the last check. Let's take a look on some examples.

Here, we monitor the logs for the server "Exchange2013A":

[PS] C:\> Monitor-MailboxDatabaseCopyLogs -Server Exchange2013A | ft

TimeStamp            LogsToCopy LogsToReplay LogCopyRate LogReplayRate
---------            ---------- ------------ ----------- -------------
4/18/2018 1:39:51 PM 35         27           -29         17
4/18/2018 1:40:00 PM 31         12           4           15
4/18/2018 1:40:09 PM 30         11           1           1
4/18/2018 1:40:18 PM 29         22           1           -11
4/18/2018 1:40:27 PM 38         34           -9          -12
4/18/2018 1:40:36 PM 34         25           4           9
4/18/2018 1:40:43 PM 14         40           20          -15
4/18/2018 1:40:52 PM 7          21           7           19
4/18/2018 1:41:01 PM 0          4            7           17
4/18/2018 1:41:10 PM 0          0            0           4
4/18/2018 1:41:19 PM 0          0            0           0

 [PS] C:\>

and here we monitor the logs of the database "IT":

[PS] C:\>Monitor-MailboxDatabaseCopyLogs -Database "IT" -Interval 4 | ft

TimeStamp            LogsToCopy LogsToReplay LogCopyRate LogReplayRate
---------            ---------- ------------ ----------- -------------
4/18/2018 1:54:01 PM 8          105          0           -105
4/18/2018 1:54:05 PM 17         105          -9          0
4/18/2018 1:54:09 PM 13         106          4           -1
4/18/2018 1:54:12 PM 7          113          6           -7
4/18/2018 1:54:16 PM 3          118          4           -5
4/18/2018 1:54:20 PM 0          85           3           33
4/18/2018 1:54:24 PM 0          24           0           61
4/18/2018 1:54:28 PM 0          3            0           21
4/18/2018 1:54:32 PM 0          0            0           3
4/18/2018 1:54:35 PM 0          0            0           0

[PS] C:\>

I hope you'll find it useful!

Popular posts from this blog

Domain Controller Machine Password Reset

Image
On my lab environment, I've configured two Active Directory sites since most enterprises have offices in more that one places. My lab however is not running 24/7 and the domain controllers in the second site are rarely turned on in order to save resources. This leads to issues with the Active Directory replication such as the "The target principal name is incorrect" error when I execute:  repadmin /syncall /AdeP. To remedy the issue, we have to reset the machine password of the domain controller that has been offline. First off, we are going to stop and disable the Kerberos Key Distribution Center (kdc) service on the problematic domain controller, in our case DC4. There may be some tickets in the cache so we should also clear them using klist purge Now it's time to change the machine password of the domain controller using the command netdom resetpwd /s:dc3 /ud:lab\administrator /pd:* Replace the "lab\administrator" with an account on your
Keep reading

Configuring a Certificate on Exchange Receive Connector

Today's article is about configuring Exchange receive connectors with specific certificates. Out of the box, Exchange uses self signed certificates to provide TLS secured mail flow. This will definitely be an issue if you expose the SMTP protocol to client computers since they won't trust the certificate. In this article we are going to configure a certificate that was issued by a third part authority to the Client Frontend receive connector. We'll start with getting the thumbprint of the certificate using the Get-ExchangeCertificate cmdlet: [PS] C:\> Get-ExchangeCertificate Thumbprint                               Subject ----------                               ------- 241B864DC82C664FECBA18B8D54987AAFB65B4C2 CN=*.lab.com, ... D4D210886B34E690191A1F008C78FDD0E7325DD4 CN=Exchange2013A 960171662EB261162F9C8CBE12E0B75D6F06ABB0 CN=Microsoft Exchange Server Auth Certificate 2690324B827A9F2B75D59104F81CAAA57CDD627B CN=WMSvc-Exchange2013A [PS]
Keep reading

Running Multiple NGINX Ingress Controllers in AKS

Image
In some of the previous articles of this blog, we went through the process of installing NGINX as the Ingress Controller in AKS clusters. Either for applications that should be available directly from the public internet, or for applications that should only be accessed from networks considered internal. In the majority of the cases, however, and given that an AKS cluster is an environment that is designed to host multiple applications and provide economy at scale, additional ingress controllers may be required. In this post, we're going to go through the process of deploying an additional NGINX ingress controller that is going to be used for internal applications. The below diagram depicts the desired outcome: The Angular application is published via the public NGINX through the Azure Load Balancer that has been assigned a public IP. The .NET app is published by a different set of NGINX pods that are deployed in a different namespace and their ingress controller service is connect
Keep reading