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Network Management
January 2007 |
Control e-mail’s impact on performance At Mississippi’s Department of Mental Health, five geographically distant regional centers, including North Mississippi Regional Center (NMRC) in Oxford, Miss., work together to provide services to individuals with developmental disabilities throughout the state. E-mail has become the preferred method of communication at NMRC since it rolled out Exchange e-mail three years ago. NMRC’s rapid adoption of e-mail resulted, however, in an IT nightmare as the user count quadrupled in 18 months–and the number of requests for e-mail accounts kept growing. When Microsoft Exchange 2003 gave even a hint of slowing down, harried users were quick to call NMRC’s IT staff to ask that the problem be fixed instantly. Finding the extra time needed to handle these e-mail “help” calls was nearly impossible for the IT staff’s one e-mail savvy technician. NRMC provides its own IT services for its approximately 400 local and remote users. Even though the NMRC e-mail network is autonomous, it utilizes the state’s central IT services group in Jackson, Miss., as a gateway to relay out of the NMRC network to other facilities and the Internet. Some 10 additional sites connect directly via frame relay to an internal Cisco switch that puts them within its firewall, while another eight sites connect via dial-up using a NAT address provided by the state to access a secure port for Exchange Web access. “Bandwidth is a main priority here, and we have so many applications running that we cannot afford to have bottlenecks in even one area,” says Brandon McHenry, NMRC’s systems administrator. Because Exchange provides no features that give administrators a top-down view of how the e-mail network is performing, McHenry says he is constantly challenged to understand where and why Exchange performs or does not perform throughout the day. While SNMP and Microsoft Office Manager (MOM) help examine server-based statistics such as utilization rates, they do not provide e-mail usage metrics or health and performance metrics that reflect the end-user’s experience. “Things can get hectic around here, so I knew I needed to automate e-mail management, or it would quickly stack up on me,” McHenry says.
FINDING A SOLUTION DYS Analytics’ E-mail CONTROL! for Exchange (ECX) software seemed to fit the bill, and after a demo, McHenry concluded that the solution was well suited to his network. ECX included the reporting, tracking and performance metrics NMRC needed in order to gain top-down visibility into its e-mail use patterns. The software includes the capability to report both real-time and historical Exchange usage information. ECX also includes a feature that allows the IT staff to periodically send test probe messages to ensure end-to-end message delivery times are within threshold. Within a week of purchasing the software, McHenry gained a new understanding of the e-mail network and learned how to assess how users were using e-mail. He immediately started saving time with the ability to address help calls more quickly–even proactively addressing issues before users complained. Within three weeks, McHenry was able to provide performance reports to his management team and was making use of many of ECX’s functions on a daily basis. The tracking feature was one of the big reasons McHenry chose the software. NRMC needed a way to determine if messages were getting dropped, filtered out or hung up outside the network. For instance, in his first few days of working with ECX, McHenry got the typical phone calls from users asking, “Did my e-mail get delivered?” Now, instead of searching through logs stored deep within the server–a three- to five-minute task for every inquiry–and calling the user back with his findings, McHenry can click on an icon and answer the question while the user remains on the phone. The software’s tracking feature enables him to pinpoint if there was a problem and where it was. “Without an e-mail performance-management tool, there’s no way I could ever see how Exchange is performing,” McHenry explains. NMRC also takes advantage of the software’s ability to provide e-mail audit trails to answer questions about employees’ use of the network. McHenry can see if someone sends confidential information to unsecured internal or external e-mail addresses. While the product lacks some tracking criteria that McHenry says he would find useful, such as being able to track messages via subject name or to filter content based on the body of a message, The software’s tracking features have met the bulk of his e-mail management needs. The software provides an at-a-glance view of the network that is particularly helpful to IT staffers, McHenry says. The HealthTrack feature displays a graphic of the NMRC Exchange network, with green lines between servers to illustrate e-mail flow within tolerance and red lines where it is not. If the unexpected occurs–for example, a technician disconnects a network cable–ECX highlights the broken route so IT can repair the connection, possibly before end-users even know it is down.
GETTING A CLEAR VIEW McHenry says his IT staff does not have the extra time it takes to create custom reports, so the reporting features are especially useful. The reporting templates and graphical analysis can automatically create reports on items such as total e-mail volume, bandwidth utilization and e-mail growth. When quarterly or annual budgets need to be reviewed, McHenry is able to provide charts and graphs illustrating trends in e-mail volume to show if the e-mail service has met service level agreements. McHenry expects to use many of the other features of ECX, like reports to help balance e-mail server loads, confirm server status and clean up inactive mailboxes. In a small organization with limited IT resources, every asset has to be productive, including e-mail inboxes, McHenry explains. While actual growth in the user count has stabilized, NMRC is looking for ways to curb the increasing growth in e-mail data storage requirements. ECX already helps the IT staff keep tabs on e-mail mailbox sizes and activity–allowing NMRC to set or revise e-mail policies on mailbox storage limits and sender/recipient settings. With Exchange network performance an increasingly important component behind NRMC’s services, the IT team sees a growing role for solutions like ECX. McHenry says he would like to be able to automatically enforce, not just establish, e-mail use policies–something that is not included in ECX, but is a capability that DYS says it soon will have. NMRC is also considering the addition of e-mail archiving software to help manage its growing system. “The powers that be–the people who sign the checks–need solid data to consider when we will need another server to handle future growth,” McHenry explains. “Gaining an at-a-glance view of how my users are using Exchange and how Exchange is responding to those demands, really helps paint the picture for everyone to see–and makes you breathe easier as a network professional.”
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