Finding Sick Servers

To determine which server is causing problems, you can use the Server Health option in the management console. You will find an overview of the health state of the individual Exchange servers in the Topology Views , where you can select a server and drill down in the tree structure to the identified problem, and then search for a solution in the product knowledge base or your internal corporate knowledge database.

The Exchange Server 2013 Management Pack provides a view of all active alerts, that is, all alerts still not automatically resolved or resolved by Operations Manager administrators. Right-click to open the Health Explorer in the context menu and display the entity health of the component. Very often, the component will be monitored by the Managed Availability service in Exchange 2013. A more common error occurs on Outlook Web Access (OWA) logon to a client access server. To find solutions for the problems, you need to check the trace logs on the client access server. These logs, which are located by default in the installation directory of the Exchange Server below Logging\Monitoring\OWA, provide information about the cause of the error.

Double-clicking on the server opens the Health Explorer window, in which you can determine the service component that has a failed state. Clicking on the component displays the information for its health record. You can check a component's state using Operations Manager PowerShell to verify the OWA proxy component:

Get-ServerHealth Server1.contoso.com | ?{$_.HealthSetName
-eq "OWA.Proxy"}

If the result indicates, for example, a problem with the IIS application pool for OWA, you can use the following command to restart the test associated with the Managed Availability Exchange 2013 monitor:

Invoke-MonitoringProbe OWA.Proxy\OWAProxyTestProbe -Server Server1.contoso.com | Format-List

Exchange 2013 uses the Managed Availability function to monitor hundreds of Exchange functions. The recovery information in the Operations Manager console shows details for resolving the problem. In this case, you need to restart MSExchangeOWAAppPool. You can restart MSExchangeOWAAppPool using the IIS management console or the appcmd command-line program. To restart MSExchangeOWAAppPool with AppCmd, type

Appcmd recycle APPPOOL MSExchange-OWAAppPool

and recheck the status of the OWA component. If the problem has been fixed, the server state will change on the Operations Manager console.

Monitoring Hyper-V

Against the background of its cloud initiative, Microsoft provides the Operations Manager Management Pack for Windows Server 2012 R2 and its Hyper-V role, thus giving admins the ability to monitor the overall performance of the virtualization environment and keep track of the configuration with numerous reports.

The Hyper-V Management Pack (HVMP) is designed to monitor the health state of a virtualization environment holistically. With optional integration between Operations Manager and Virtual Machine Manager (VMM), you tie in the two platforms for better integration.

HVMP monitors the Hyper-V role on a Windows Server running Windows Server 2012 R2 and supports System Center 2012 R2 Operations Manager and failover clusters, although not agentless monitoring.

HVMP for Operations Manager requires the following Management Packs:

• System Center 2012 R2 Operations Manager
• Microsoft.Windows.HyperV.Library
• Microsoft.Windows.Library
• System.Library
• Microsoft.SystemCenter.Library
• Microsoft.Windows.HyperV.2012.Discovery
• Microsoft.Windows.Server.Library
• Microsoft.Windows.Server.2012.R2.Discovery
• Microsoft.Windows.HyperV.2012.R2.Monitoring
• System.Health.Library
• System.Performance.Library
• System.Virtualization.Library

The download package for HVMP contains the following files:

• Microsoft.Windows.HyperV.2012.R2.Discovery.mp
• Microsoft.Windows.HyperV.2012.R2.Monitoring.mp
• Microsoft.Windows.HyperV.Library.mp
• EULA.rtf (Microsoft End User License Agreement)
• OpsMgr_MP_WS_HyperV.docx (Management Pack Guide)

In the Word document included in the download you will find more important information about installing and configuring the Management Pack.

Hyper-V Management Pack

HVMP for the System Center Operations Manager provides numerous monitoring and reporting capabilities (Table 2). As usual, you need to import the System Center 2012 R2 Management Pack [2] into the Operations Manager console after downloading. As with most other Management Packs, the recommendation again applies to create a copy then configure other customizations, such as overrides. After you import the Management Pack, acquisition of all relevant Hyper-V server data then starts using the agent. Again, the data is stored in the Operations Manager database, and insights are provided courtesy of the Operations Manager console.

The Host Health Dashboard in the Operations Manager console is used to display the integrity of the monitored Hyper-V hosts. The display shows the active host alerts in addition to the host state. If such a warning appears, you can click on it for in-depth information.

With the release of System Center 2012 R2 Virtual Machine Manager Update Rollup 3, Microsoft has provided new Operations Manager VMM resource virtualization packs [3] that give admins a new dashboard view of all Hyper-V servers managed by System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM). The dashboard (Figure 5) displays the overall status of all Hyper-V servers, their properties, and performance counters. You will benefit from a view of all virtual machines identified, including the status of each machine based on the traffic light principle (red, amber, green).

Figure 5: The Virtual Machine Dashboard has a variety of status information for all Hyper-V servers.