What’s New in Original Management Pack Release

  • Article

Applies To: Exchange Server, Operations Manager 2007 R2

This section highlights the new and updated features in version 6.0.6623.0 of the Exchange Server 2007 Management Pack.

  • Template for configuring Client Access server synthetic transactions. This management pack includes a Client Access Server Monitoring Management Pack template that provides a wizard style of interface for configuring synthetic transactions against Outlook Web Access (OWA), Exchange ActiveSync, Web Services, POP3, and IMAP.

  • Template for configuring Exchange 2007 Intra-organizational mail flow synthetic transactions. This management pack includes an Exchange 2007 Intra-organizational Mail Flow Monitoring Management Pack template that provides a wizard style of interface for configuring mail flow synthetic transactions between agent-managed Exchange 2007 Mailbox servers.

  • Reports. This management pack provides a set of reports specific to Exchange 2007. For the list of reports and for more information about the reports, see Appendix: Reports. In addition, more than 15 Service Level Objectives (SLOs) are defined, allowing you to track various aspects of Exchange availability and performance compared to your SLOs.

  • This management pack supports a new feature in Operations Manager 2007 R2 that provides enhanced object search and filtering so that the report search feature automatically searches for the objects that the report expects.

  • Improved disk monitoring. The management pack improves Exchange disk monitoring by providing support for mount points and by discovering three types of disks. This improvement enables you to establish a disk monitoring standard across all Exchange 2007 servers using fewer overrides. The types of disks discovered are Database (on the Mailbox server role), Log (on the Mailbox server role), and Queue (on the Hub and Edge server roles). For information about how to configure Exchange 2007 Disk Monitoring, see Configure Disk Monitoring. For information about classes in this management pack, see Classes.

  • Performance enhancements for synthetic transactions. All the synthetic transactions in this management pack use an Operations Manager 2007 R2 hosting feature for Windows PowerShell technology that provides a performance improvement when running synthetic transactions.

  • A significant number of rules and monitors that are not actionable or may be noisy are disabled. Note that many of these rules are still in the management pack so that you can enable them if necessary. For a list of rules and monitors that are disabled by default in this management pack, see Appendix: Monitors and Rules Disabled by Default.

  • A number of performance collection rules are disabled. For a list of disabled performance collection rules, see Performance Collection Rules Disabled by Default.

  • Support for monitoring any number of Exchange organizations using a single Operations Manager 2007 management group. There are no specific requirements imposed by this management pack for monitoring multiple Exchange organizations.

  • Full support for clustered configurations using Windows Clustering technology. For more details, see Monitoring Clustered Mailbox Servers and Log Shipping.

  • An extensive class model, showing the relevant Exchange 2007 server roles and components, as well as service-centric components, allowing you to measure availability or performance at a granular level. The class model fully supports the Distributed Application Designer, allowing you to create custom distributed applications using the appropriate Exchange 2007 components. The appropriate classes and monitors are declared public, enabling you to extend the monitoring if needed. For hierarchical diagrams of the Exchange 2007 management pack classes, see Classes.

  • Improved low-privilege support. This management pack supports installing the agent with the minimum rights required by the Operations Manager agent.

  • Improved tasks. The management pack includes a number of tasks that simplify troubleshooting and reduce the amount of time to resolve the alert.

  • Improved topology discovery. This management pack introduces a number of improvements to topology discovery.

    • There is no central discovery script. Each agent is responsible for discovering its piece of the topology. This ensures that potential permissions and trust issues are minimized. There are no requirements on trusts in order to generate the topology.

    • The topology will show only agent-managed Exchange 2007 servers, ensuring that the topology consists only of servers that the Exchange administrator has chosen to monitor.

  • Improved synthetic transactions. This management pack improves the support for the Exchange 2007 synthetic transactions in several ways:

  • The discovery of Exchange 2007 server roles is disabled by default and minimal Exchange 2007 monitoring is applied. This allows you to discover and monitor your servers gradually, as well as tune the management pack as you bring more agent-managed Exchange 2007 servers into the Operations Manager environment. For more information, see Enable Exchange 2007 Server Role Discovery.