Free Microsoft Exchange Monitor, by Solarwinds

Since a while now, i've been a huge fan of Solarwinds (http://www.solarwinds.com) before knowing and falling in love with Nagios (www.nagios.org). Well, this post isn't to harp on the sexy Nagios but to talk about a quick monitoring tool for Exchange servers. Solarwinds released their monitoring tool for Exchange and i like it for its simplicity to use.

The most significant part is that it's free, which means, go download it even if you don't plan to use it (haha). Here's the link. http://www.solarwinds.com/register/index.aspx?Program=825&c=70150000000Djc6

The good thing about this tool, it not only does monitoring of basic OS health but the health of Exchange at the application level.

Exchange, as many of us know, is like an infant, she will cry bloody murder if you don't stick a suckle up her mouth every once in a while. But, lets admit it, who has the time to stare blankly at the ugly perfmon (Windows Performance Monitor) or run dry WMI scripts to spring VB's blend popups if there's something odd, out of the ordinary odd (i like scripting better tho).

This a true free engine unlike the many baits set out there to lure you into the overly abused word FREE (opensource aside) which won't sneak a time-bomb behind you or skin features down to mere lousy 2 functions of the 1000000 functions a paid one can do. I hope those developers who lure public into these monkeytraps just make their software GPL.

Anyway, why i like this piece is cuz it checks;

1. In real time
2. General Win health checks (like disks , CPU, memory)
3. Exchange services
4. Mail, PF and SMTP queues (see if they are collectively planning to sink the box down)
5. ..and more "sensors", but not a lot of customization
6. Pretty little interface to wrap it up but finally
7. ITS FREE.

Anyway, if you're interested in a more powerful, enterprise scale monitor (which can do the above and much much much much much more) and FREE software, go stick your mouse into www.nagios.org.