When no news is not good news

When I arrived at the office recently a user mentioned they had not received a particular email. Troubling system issues have a way of starting out like this and this day, it would seem, would be no different. The problem really hit home when I noticed the usual swathe of morning newsletters and Google alerts were unusually absent from my email inbox. I sent a quick external email and it was working – however incoming mail had stopped altogether.

Taking a look at Microsoft Exchange 2007 and its Toolbox functions everything checked out and therein lies the problem to which I will come back to later. It was only while heading to the event logs and wading through that I discovered the hub transport was refusing any more incoming mail delivery due to low disk space for logging – I had missed it originally because that particular drive still had almost 3GB of free space – clearly that wasn’t enough.

“The Microsoft Exchange Transport service is rejecting message submissions because the available disk space has dropped below the configured threshold.”

This is where our online email service from Mimecast has helped us as the missing mails have been queued up and available on the online service - this is the first time we have experienced a local Exchange problem since moving to the online service. Had this not been the case, and failing any store and forward service, these mail messages may have been bounced back to their sender - a sigh of relief follows.

So back to my case in point - what I feel is really missing from Exchange is a dashboard showing real-time status indicators with drill-down. This could include the status of the services, the mail stores, an indicator for disk space, a summary of mail queues and their activity – with an ‘at a glance’ layout. The last dozen or so unique error and warning events would also be useful and some trending pattern showing the important stats summarising those available in Performance Monitor. I have mocked a basic idea up using Sketchflow which is included in the recently released Microsoft Expression 3 Blend (of which I will talk about more in a later article). By the way, I am not aiming for any design awards in the mock-up but that is the point of Sketchflow – get your structured ideas down quickly and, barring a few inconsistencies, it seems to do the job pretty well.

So, if anyone is familiar with a product which can offer an overall, and reliable, ‘at a glance’ view of Exchange 2007 please let me know – I would love to see it.