Achieving Production Quality Messaging

By Nancy Cox  Many orga nizations now regard messaging as a mission-critical application, and network managers are feeling the heat to deliver better, cheaper, faster electronic-messaging systems. It's either produce a consistently high level of service, or face the possible threat of outsourcing.. To determine the production quality of your messaging system, you must examine the messaging system's workload and measure its performance. Key factors, such as availability, delivery times and reliability, are crucial in meeting business objectives. These objectives usually are specified in the form of service-level agreements (SLAs)--which are levied by upper management or user departments, built on user expectations and constrained by cost. The thorny problem is how to accurately and consistently measure the performance of the messaging system to determine if the objectives in the SLA are being met or exceeded. We brought several messaging management products into our central Florida corporate lab and San Mateo, Calif., l ab to determine how well they assist network managers in gathering the data necessary to determine service-level compliance. We tested Baranof Software's MailCheck, Bear Mountain Software's TOPPER, MessageWise's Mail Management Agent (2MA), NetIQ Corp.'s AppManager Suite and Tally Systems Corp.'s Veranda Enterprise Messaging Reporter. MailCheck and TOPPER are monitoring products that poll a variety of messaging systems to establish delivery times. Veranda is an information gathering and reporting tool that takes snapshots of resources such as messaging, Internet and fax servers. 2MA and AppManager are Exchange-specific products that monitor the system, gather information and report on events and messaging activity. We found that none of these products, on their own, provides all the statistical information required to measure messaging performance across a geographically dispersed enterprise with a hodgepodge of messaging clients, servers, routers, hubs, switches, directories and protocols. If you have an Microsoft Exchange environment, the most complete tool for measuring messaging performance is AppManager because it tracks more of the key metrics, monitors connectivity, provides graphical and textual reporting and lets you restart downed services. If your messaging infrastructure includes Exchange as well as other platforms--such as Internet and fax applications--you need to layer AppManager with Veranda and MailCheck, for example, to cover all your bases. Messaging managers need to provide proactive application management instead of constantly fighting brush fires. The only way to accomplish that goal is to have management products that faithfully provide metrics and good analytical tools. Measuring Messaging Performance You cannot manage what you cannot measure. To initiate performance measurement, you need to know the components of the entire messaging system and what is happening on the system. Message system components include the servers, clients, message stores, queues, directories a nd message transfer agents (gateways and connectors), as well as the communications resources linking them (routers, switches and hubs). Think of this as ground zero, where you establish a baseline from which reasonable objectives for improvement are made. Attempt to gather information over a specified period of time (daily, weekly or monthly) to get an idea of trends, busy hours and heaavy file transfer times, for example. If time constraints don't let you do this, analyze the data you have and make educated assumptions.

Other Workshops Guarding the Flaank With RADIUS & TACACS+ By Dan Backman The Ups and Downs of Analyzing Middleware By Barry Nance Integrating LDAP and The Exchange Directory By Nancy Cox