Getting Started

First things first! Before you get to troubleshoot Mail flow and other stuff, a novice administrator should be aware of certain things that will make his/her life easier.



Generally a Exchange administrator receives two types of issues:

• Server Incidents and
• User related (Outlook and Exchange settings related)

For a Novice to start learning exchange, a great place to start is the Microsoft Technet site.

http://technet.microsoft.com/hi-in/exchange/default.aspx

Coming back to Exchange Issues, there are a lot of things that can go wrong in a Exchange environment, in any case the places to check for clues of what could have went wrong are:

• Event logs(eventvwr) and
• Performance Monitors(perfmon)

Event logs are a great idea to track the issues real time and diagnose a incident.

To start with there are different types of events, the default ones are:

• Application.
• Security and
• System.

We will be interested in Application logs(For Exchange related events) and System logs(For Windows Server OS related logs)

The types of Event logs are:

• Information
• Error and
• Warning.

There are various parameters to a Event log like:

• Event ID.
• Source.
• Category.
• Time.
• Date and
• Computer in which event took place.

Event logs might look scary with out the necessary tools to decode, the most important site you need to have in your favourites is Microsoft Technet Events and Errors lookup page:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/support/ee/ee_advanced.aspx

Instead of wasting time by typing all the version details and stuff just enter the Event ID and from the result choose the appropriate one by using the Source, Category and Version of a product.

Another place you can lookup Events in case that event is logged by a Non-Microsoft product or application is:

http://www.eventid.net/

and ofcourse there is www.google.com for all other things

Once you get used to these tools, you can easily troubleshoot the events or at least get pointers to where to start from.

Another place to monitor system activity in real time to see the status of a Hardware or a software is Performance Monitor(perfmon).

Here you can add the counters of various applications or hardware and monitor their real time activity easily. Just play around with it to know which counter is for what hardware or application.

We will share about Outlook related issues in the next Blog.