Improving Availability and Reducing Operating Costs For Your UC Environment
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Improving Availability and Reducing Operating Costs for Your UC
Environment
Published: November 2008
Authors: Valentine Boiarkine, Software Architect, Blade; Peter O'Dowd, MVP Exchange Server
Contributors: Rob Sargent, Product Manager, Quest Software; Heidi Miller, Product Marketing Manager,
Quest Software; Keith Bick, Editor, Blade
For the latest information, please see http://www.quest.com/ .
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Contents
Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 4
Your Unified Communications (UC) Environment........................................................... 5
Benefits of Unified Communications (UC) ................................................................... 5
Unified Communications Components......................................................................... 5
E-mail and Unified Messaging - Voicemail and Fax Services................................. 6
Instant Messaging - Text, Voice, and Video............................................................ 6
Web Conferencing and Video Conferencing............................................................ 6
Mobile Communications - BlackBerry Enterprise Server, ActiveSync,
Communicator Mobile .............................................................................................. 6
Unified Communications Dependencies...................................................................... 7
Avoiding Downtime .................................................................................................. 7
Integrated Preventative Monitoring.................................................................................. 8
Keys to Reducing Downtime........................................................................................ 8
Choosing the Right Tools............................................................................................ 8
Service Level Agreements........................................................................................... 9
Unified Communications Monitoring Tools.................................................................. 9
Availability and Performance Monitoring - Counters, Baselines and Trends............. 10
Availability Trend and Timelines............................................................................. 10
Performance Objects and Counters....................................................................... 10
Establishing a Baseline.......................................................................................... 11
Reporting and Documentation................................................................................... 11
Troubleshooting and Diagnostics.................................................................................. 12
Performance Troubleshooting - Isolating Bottlenecks............................................... 12
Monitoring Unified Messaging Components.............................................................. 12
Conducting Regular Tests......................................................................................... 13
Resolving Problems in Your UC Environment............................................................... 14
Resolution Methodologies ......................................................................................... 14
Using Spotlight on Messaging for Issue Resolution Guidance.................................. 14
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Conclusion ................................................................................................................. 15
Appendix - Examples and Screens hots........................................................................ 16
Example 1 - Spotlight on Messaging Management Console Topology View -
Exchange Server and BlackBerry Enterprise Server................................................. 16
Example 2 - Spotlight on Messaging Management Console Topology View - Office
Communications Server............................................................................................ 17
Example 3 - BlackBerry Diagnostic Console............................................................. 18
Example 4 - Exchange Server Message Delivery Health Test.................................. 19
Example 5 - Spotlight on Messaging Built-In Reports............................................... 20
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Introduction
People in your organization communicate in many ways, including e-mail, phone, fax,
instant messaging, web, and video conferencing. Integrating these many technologies
in order to create a unified communications (UC) system can reduce costs and improve
productivity.
Because communications technology is critical to communication between business
colleagues, customers and suppliers, the reliability of that technology directly impacts
your organization's success. Unfortunately, the complexity of a unified communications
environment makes it difficult to monitor, diagnose and resolve issues accurately and
efficiently.
This whitepaper explains how Quest Spotlight on Messaging can improve the
availability of your communications system and reduce operating costs through
integrated preventative monitoring and speedy problem resolution.
You will learn how to manage and monitor your unified communications environment to
ensure smooth operation and customer satisfaction. This information is useful for IT
professionals who have implemented any combination of Exchange 2007, Office
Communications Server 2007, and BlackBerry Enterprise Server.
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Your Unified Communications (UC) Environment
Benefits of Unified Communications (UC)
Many companies today are migrating from disparate phone, e-mail, and instant
messaging systems to a consolidated unified communications solution. Unified
communications promises lower costs, increased productivity and easier compliance.
How exactly does unified communications provide these benefits? Consider e-mail:
unified communications extends your e-mail system to voicemail messages and fax.
Voicemail messages can be messages stored in the user's mailbox, enabling uniform
access and easy discovery across all types of communications. Users can apply the
same productivity features they use with e-mail (such as flagging, categorizing, and
forwarding) to voicemail and fax.
Consolidated e-mail, voicemail, and fax directories also simplify administration and
backup. Maintaining disparate systems that require specialized skills is a costly and
error-prone task. Exchange 2007 offers administrators familiar administrative tools and
methodologies to manage unified messaging functionality.
In addition, video conferencing and web conferencing technologies can greatly reduce
or even eliminate travel costs. These technologies are an environmentally friendly
alternative to travelling to onsite meetings. Regulated organizations and government
departments are encouraged to explore video conferencing to prove their commitment
to operating in an environmentally sustainable way.
Finally, web and video conferencing can greatly increase employee productivity and
expand the reach of your organization. Many companies use these options to conduct
meetings, demonstrations, training and collaborative sessions with teammates and
customers around the world.
Unified Communications Components
The UC environment consists of multiple communication technologies as detailed
below. Many vendors today provide UC software and hardware components. Popular
solutions include Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 for e-mail and unified messaging;
Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 for instant messaging and conferencing;
voice over internet protocol (VoIP) to integrate the telephone system with the UC
environment and BlackBerry Enterprise Server to provide mobile access.
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E-mail and Unified Messaging - Voicemail and Fax Services
Microsoft Exchange Server is an established enterprise e-mail solution, and Exchange
Server 2007 introduces new unified messaging features. When unified messaging is
enabled, the Exchange server acts as the voicemail system: it receives voicemail and
fax messages and places them into the appropriate user's mailbox. Exchange unified
messaging integrates into the telephony environment using VoIP technologies. It can be
connected directly with a compatible VoIP PBX or with an incompatible analog or digital
PBX using an inexpensive VoIP gateway device.
Instant Messaging - Text, Voice, and Video
Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS), Office Communicator, and Office Live
Meeting provide enterprise level instant messaging (IM) services. Although many
organizations use "home-user" products like Windows Live Messenger or AOL Instant
Messaging, some are realizing the benefits of implementing a corporate instant
messaging system. OCS offers retrieval of contact information from Active Directory,
group IM functionality, enterprise security, and compliance archiving features. Corporate
IM solutions increase employee productivity through the convenience of asynchronous,
non-invasive communication, while enabling compliance with regulations like the Public
Records Act (PRA). It also allows IT administrators to lock down the use of Live
Messenger and other applications.
OCS provides seamless voice and video messaging, as well as ad-hoc voice and video
conferencing facilities. It can integrate with your telephony system so users can place
outside calls using Office Communicator and receive calls from the public telephone
network (PSTN). A VoIP advanced gateway device may be required to connect OCS to
the corporate PBX.
Web Conferencing and Video Conferencing
When used together, Office Communications Server and the Live Meeting client provide
a formal multi-party conferencing solution. Web conferencing allows users to hold
interactive online meetings and view digital content like PowerPoint presentations,
images, and video. High quality audio and video from multiple parties is mixed on the
server and delivered to every attendee's desktop.
Mobile Communications - BlackBerry Enterprise Server, ActiveSync,
Communicator Mobile
Mobile e-mail is a mature technology that many users rely on daily. BlackBerry devices
are immensely popular, and many organizations deploy their own BlackBerry Enterprise
Servers to deliver e-mail services from the Exchange server to the users' devices. Other
organizations use Windows Mobile devices and Exchange ActiveSync wireless e-mail
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synchronization. Some organizations have a mixed Windows Mobile and BlackBerry
environment.
Communicator Mobile instant messaging client for OCS can be installed on Windows
Mobile devices. This client software provides basic corporate instant messaging
services to the mobile device.
Unified Communications Dependencies
The unified messaging environment is a complex, multi-component environment. Aside
from the core components (Exchange, OCS, and BlackBerry Enterprise Server), it relies
on other infrastructure services. The key dependencies of your UC environment are
Active Directory, Domain Name System (DNS), public key infrastructure (PKI), firewalls,
and core network infrastructure like routers and switches. Outages of these services will
shut down your unified messaging environment.
Avoiding Downtime
Users increasingly rely on unified communications technologies for vital everyday tasks,
and outages disrupt both internal and external communications. The cost of downtime
includes lost sales and business opportunities, decreased customer satisfaction and
distressed end users.
E-mail and phone services are critical, and any lengthy loss is seldom tolerated. But
outages of services that may seem less important, like web conferencing, can also have
a great impact. Imagine the frustration caused by the inability to hold an online meeting
at a chosen time, or an interruption to an important video conference.
Unfortunately, as users are demanding more from communications technology, it is
becoming more complex to operate and manage. Maintaining and monitoring one
communications system can be a full-time job, while monitoring a large enterprise
environment comprised of many interdependent systems is virtually impossible without
specialized tools.
The next chapter will explain the recommended approaches to monitoring your entire
unified communications system.
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Integrated Preventative Monitoring
Keys to Reducing Downtime
Three key strategies can keep downtime to an absolute minimum:
1. Invest in very high quality, redundant hardware. This includes redundant servers,
network components, and clustered solutions. However, few organizations are
willing and able to make the substantial investment required.
2. Avoid downtime caused by misconfiguration. Because of the complexity of
unified communications systems, a significant share of downtime results from
misconfiguration. To reduce this risk, invest in qualified people, ongoing training
and keep accurate up-to-date documentation for all systems.
3. Use tools to conduct ongoing preventative monitoring and diagnostics. This cost-
effective approach enables you to resolve bottlenecks and identify many issues
before they cause downtime. When an outage does occur, you will be notified
immediately so you can deal with the problem quickly, minimizing downtime.
Choosing the Right Tools
A unified communications environment consists of many servers and interdependent
components, including Exchange, OCS, and BES servers. Configuring effective multi-
server monitoring using built-in tools like Windows Performance Monitor, Exchange
Management Console, and OCS Management Console can be difficult. In fact, it is
virtually impossible to consolidate topology, configuration, availability, and performance
data across the systems within your unified communications environment.
Quest Spotlight on Messaging enables smart monitoring and diagnostics across the
entire UC environment from a single monitoring console. By consolidating topology and
monitoring data from heterogeneous systems into a single, meaningful representation,
Spotlight on Messaging can help you accurately document your unified communications
infrastructure, quickly detect problems and prevent issues from ever affecting your
users.
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Service Level Agreements
Every organization wants its unified communications environment to be available 100%
of the time. However, this is seldom possible. Achieving very high availability (99.9%
plus) involves substantial investment in redundant hardware and infrastructure.
Organizations must recognize the trade-off between high availability and the cost of
resources needed to achieve it.
A service level agreement (SLA) is an agreement between the consumers of your
system, often referred to as "customers," and the IT department. The SLA defines
standards for the availability and performance of each component of the unified
communications system. Measuring actual availability and performance against the
standards set in the SLA determines whether your unified communications environment
is meeting expectations.
Include the following categories in your SLA for each component of the unified
messaging system.
• Services provided
• Expected availability of each service
• Expected hours of operation of each service
• Planned downtime windows
• Expected performance and maximum load and throughput
• Support provided to end users
Unified Communications Monitoring Tools
Many administrators want to automate ongoing system monitoring and operations, but
this can be a difficult task, especially for a complex environment like a unified
communications system. The key questions administrators have about monitoring are:
• What performance counters should I check?
• How often should I perform checks?
• How can I detect a bottleneck or a potential problem in what seems to be an
overwhelming amount of gathered data?
• How can I consolidate information from multiple monitoring tools?
Built-in management tools that ship with Exchange, OCS, and BES include some
monitoring capabilities. However, implementing effective monitoring using these tools
requires effort and expertise in many areas. For example, the built-in Performance
Monitor allows you to monitor hundreds of objects and performance counters, but which
ones are important? Queue Viewer built in with Exchange 2007 is a great tool to view
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queues on a single Exchange server at a given point in time, but how can you save the
gathered data to analyze trends and diagnose possible congestion?
Many administrators turn to Spotlight on Messaging to address these issues and
configure comprehensive centralized monitoring with minimal administrative effort. Right
out of the box, Spotlight on Messaging delivers the ability to monitor performance,
availability, and statistics on your unified communications servers.
This tool also includes automated bottleneck and configuration issue detection, and
provides easy to follow guidance on suggested problem resolution. Spotlight on
Messaging is an invaluable tool for IT professionals that maintain complex unified
communications environments and who want to minimize administrative effort while
maximizing availability.
Availability and Performance Monitoring - Counters, Baselines and
Trends
Monitoring the health of the unified communications system involves monitoring both
availability and performance.
Availability Trend and Timelines
Availability monitoring refers to recording uptime and downtime of a server or service.
Use the results of availability monitoring to measure the actual events against the
expected availability defined in your SLA.
Spotlight on Messaging provides easy-to-interpret availability reports that show uptime
trends of the entire system. These reports can easily be broken down by component
(such as OCS or BlackBerry Enterprise Server). Spotlight on Messaging can also show
availability timelines and trends. All availability reports provided by Spotlight on
Messaging can be readily used for presentations and documentation archives.
Performance Objects and Counters
Performance monitoring refers to monitoring a particular object (such as a disk
subsystem, memory, or message queue) against specific performance indicators (such
as disk queue length, disk operations per second, available memory, or message queue
length). If the current values are out of the ordinary, it is possible that a bottleneck is
forming, creating a potential problem.
How do you know when values are out of the ordinary? You must compare the actual
values with the performance baseline.
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Establishing a Baseline
The performance baseline is the values of relevant performance counters recorded
when the workload and performance of your UC system is ordinary and the system is
operating well. The baseline allows you to identify bottlenecks and potential problems. It
also helps you establish trends over time.
By comparing the results of regular monitoring with the baseline values, you can detect
deviations and bottlenecks. Without the baseline, it would be impossible to know
whether the counters you are viewing are normal or abnormal. For example, 80%
processor time may be normal for one server, while for another server it may indicate an
imminent component failure.
Reporting and Documentation
It is critical that you document your unified communications environment and keep the
information up to date. The documentation provides a consolidated view of your entire
unified communications environment and acts as a support mechanism for decision
making.
This documentation is a valuable resource for every operational task, from disaster
recovery to capacity management to new team member training. Many organizations
overlook the task of creating documentation, often with costly consequences. For
example, if you lose an important team member and have to hire a contractor, it is
virtually impossible to quickly brief this new person about the system without proper
documentation.
Use Spotlight on Messaging's Topology Viewer to automate the effort-intensive task of
creating accurate documentation about your complex unified communications
environment. Examples of Spotlight on Messaging's built-in topology views are provided
in Appendix - Examples and Screenshots ; see Example 1 - Spotlight on Messaging
Management Console Topology View - Exchange and BlackBerry Enterprise Servers
and Example 2 - Spotlight on Messaging Management Console Topology View - Office
Communications Server . These topology views are very easy to produce, and they can
be used as part of system documentation.
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Troubleshooting and Diagnostics
One of the most effective ways to improve the availability of your unified
communications environment is to enable your IT professionals to diagnose,
troubleshoot and resolve issues quickly. Spotlight on Messaging provides detailed,
meaningful reports on the system state that graphically identify servers and components
experiencing problems. Example 3 - BlackBerry Diagnostic Console in Appendix -
Examples and Screenshots shows how Spotlight on Messaging identifies failed servers,
the source of problems (in this example, overflowing processor queue) and critical
events.
With Spotlight on Messaging, it is possible to drill down further to locate more
information about the problem that has been identified.
Performance Troubleshooting Isolating Bottlenecks
Prior to unified messaging, messaging system performance was not a high priority for
many organizations, particularly for asynchronous systems like e-mail. Users rarely
noticed a one-second delay in the arrival of an e-mail message. With the introduction of
unified communications technologies, however, performance bottlenecks are far more
noticeable. Users routinely express aggravation with lag time, poor quality of voice and
video calls, delays, and poorly rendered graphics in web conferencing.
Use the following guidelines to ensure optimum system performance:
• Size the system for the load it will carry. Take into account the number of
concurrent users, server hardware, bandwidth requirements, and latency.
• Continuously monitor the system to ensure servers are operating normally,
without bottlenecks. Use tools like Spotlight on Messaging to automatically alert
the responsible IT professionals of potential issues.
• Respond to bottlenecks and resolve potential problems quickly. Never expect a
problem to resolve itself. Small ones frequently escalate into full-scale disasters if
left unattended.
Monitoring Unified Messaging Components
Organizations with unified messaging implementations should consider investing in a
centralized monitoring and troubleshooting tool like Quest Spotlight on Messaging. This
tool is able to schedule various health tests and produce reports across the entire
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unified communications environment. These reports provide a consolidated view of
Exchange, OCS, and BlackBerry Enterprise Servers. Consolidated reports give you an
understanding of the entire environment and help you make better operational
decisions.
As a minimum, for all Exchange, OCS, and BES servers, monitor the following
components:
• CPU utilization - Focus on overloaded CPU.
• Memory utilization - Sufficient memory must be available to services. Memory
usage that increases over time indicates a higher load or a potential memory
leak.
• Disk utilization - A non-zero disk queue length over a significant period of time
indicates a disk bottleneck, and possibly an undersized disk subsystem.
You should also monitor components specific to each system. For example, for
Exchange Server, you need to monitor internal and external message queues; for OCS,
you should monitor database throughput, active client connection, and bandwidth
consumption.
Spotlight on Messaging provides a library of targeted, useful reports and performance
counters that are specifically relevant to any unified communications system. For an
example and a list of some of the available reports, see Example 5 - Spotlight on
Messaging Built-In Reports in Appendix - Examples and Screenshots .
Conducting Regular Tests
Mature communication technologies like Exchange Server and BlackBerry enable
administrators to conduct simple, effective, semi-automated functionality tests, such as
connectivity tests, logon tests, and service health tests. Seeing the results of many
operations enables you to isolate potential problems more easily. Manually testing these
parameters would be time-consuming and nearly impossible.
Although Exchange Management Shell includes health testing cmdlets and OCS
administration tools provide functionality verification wizards, only Spotlight on
Messaging allows you to run all relevant tests across all unified messaging components
with virtually zero configuration.
For an example of a test result report from Spotlight on Messaging see Example 4 -
Exchange Server Message Delivery Health Test in Appendix - Examples and
Screenshots .
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Resolving Problems in Your UC Environment
In the earlier chapters we discussed the importance of preventative monitoring and how
intelligent monitoring tools can help you diagnose and isolate potential problems and
bottlenecks.
It is important to repeat the following guidance for best availability and smooth
operations:
⇒ Resolve bottlenecks and attend to other potential problems quickly. Rarely does
a problem resolve itself. Small problems frequently escalate into full-scale
disasters if left unattended.
To ensure that the IT department addresses issues as quickly as possible, some
organizations include maximum problem resolution windows in their SLA.
Resolution Methodologies
Most performance and availability problems are resolved in one of two ways:
• By replacing a failed, failing, or inadequate component
For example, if the disk subsystem is constantly a bottleneck, as indicated by
high disk queue lengths, the inadequate disk must be replaced with a better
performing disk. Sometimes you need to add a new server or component to
distribute the load.
• By re-configuring the system
For problems arising from suboptimal system configuration, you need to reconfigure
the system in an optimal way.
The success of IT professionals is often directly related to their ability to choose the
correct resolution strategy for each issue. They can draw upon a great wealth of
knowledge about unified communications environment issues and specific resolutions in
product documentation, online knowledge bases, articles, forums, and weblogs.
Using Spotlight on Messaging for Issue Resolution Guidance
When you are alerted to an issue, especially one that may cause downtime, quickly
locating reliable resolution information can be difficult. Spotlight on Messaging presents
comprehensive, reliable suggestions on how to resolve a specific problem.
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Using Spotlight on Messaging can greatly reduce issue resolution time, thereby
reducing downtime to the unified messaging system. You can also avoid the costs of
hiring outside consultants or providing specialized training in troubleshooting.
Conclusion
Unified communications systems deliver key services to your business. Users rely on e-
mail, phone, instant messaging, and conferencing to communicate amongst themselves
and with the wider community of prospects, customers, and partners. Users expect
these systems to be available on demand.
Your goal as an IT professional is to ensure the best possible availability for the
systems your users rely on. The service level agreement documents the availability you
commit to deliver.
Integrated monitoring across the entire UC infrastructure allows you to better
understand the actual state of your environment. This enables you to detect and resolve
potential issues before they become problems that affect your users.
Spotlight on Messaging is an excellent platform for centralized monitoring, diagnostics,
and resolution across the entire unified communications environment. Implementing
Spotlight on Messaging will increase unified communications system availability through
preventative troubleshooting and speedy resolution.
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Appendix - Examples and Screenshots
This appendix provides sample screenshots that illustrate how Spotlight on Messaging
provides integrated monitoring of the unified communications environment.
Example 1 - Spotlight on Messaging Management Console Topology
View - Exchange Server and BlackBerry Enterprise Server
The Spotlight on Messaging Management Console provides a seamless view of your
unified communications topology, including relationships between servers. Topology
views are available for the Exchange Server and BlackBerry Enterprise Server
environment; and the OCS server environment. At a glance, you can assess which
servers are healthy (green), which may pose a potential problem (amber), and those
that require attention (red). The topology view can be filtered by a specified criterion or
grouped by domain or site.
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Example 2 - Spotlight on Messaging Management Console Topology
View - Office Communications Server
Office Communications Server implementations consist of many servers and several
server roles. Often it is difficult to obtain a clear picture of your OCS topology, especially
if your environment has grown organically. The Spotlight on Messaging Management
Console instantly presents all servers in your OCS topology by pool, role, site, and
domain. It highlights the servers that are currently experiencing problems or that have
potential issues so that you can resolve the problems before they negatively impact
your business.
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Example 3 - BlackBerry Diagnostic Console
The BlackBerry diagnostic console shows vital information about the health and usage
of your BlackBerry Enterprise server.
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Example 4 - Exchange Server Message Delivery Health Test
This example shows the Spotlight on Messaging report that is presented after internal
message delivery health tests are conducted.
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Example 5 - Spotlight on Messaging Built-In Reports
On the left of this screenshot is the list of reports available with Spotlight on Messaging.
One report is shown on the right, the Exchange Server Physical Memory Utilization
report.
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