This chapter provides an overview of how to monitor Office Communications Server by using the Windows Event Logs, Performance Monitor, and Microsoft Operations Manager 2005. The chapter also describes how to monitor and report usage by using Call Detail Records.
Office Communications Server 2007 enables administrators to monitor the health and state of any Office Communications Server through a comprehensive set of events and performance counters associated with every server role. Office Communications Server 2007 currently offers three ways to help monitor the health of Office Communications Servers:
Admins Tools Office Communications Server 2007 offers convenient monitoring views straight from the status pane. A snapshot of each server's configuration, status, event logs, and performance monitor is integrated into the Microsoft Management Console (MMC).
Microsoft Operations Manager The health details of the servers can be monitored by using Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) 2005. Office Communications Server 2007 makes available a management pack for MOM to easily monitor the health of your Office Communications Server 2007 deployment.
Call Detail Records Office Communications Server 2007 introduces Call Detail Records (CDR) to capture usage records for all types of communication activity on Office Communications Servers.
The sections that follow describe how you can use each of these methods to monitor Office Communications Servers.
The Admins Tools for Office Communications Server 2007 is a comprehensive Microsoft Management Console. In addition to providing an interface to configure Office Communications Servers, it provides the following three mechanisms to monitor the status of Office Communications Servers:
Status Pane The status pane (right-hand pane) in the MMC allows monitoring the overall status of all functionalities and settings of your Office Communications Servers. If multiple server roles are installed on the same physical server, a separate tab becomes available to provide a snapshot of each server role.
Event Log Tab The Events tab in the MMC provides a convenient way to monitor recent Office Communications Server events without having to open the Event Viewer MMC in the Administrative Tools folder.
Performance Tab The Performance tab in the MMC provides a convenient way to monitor performance counters for various components of Office Communications Server without having to open the Performance Monitor (PerfMon) MMC in the Administrative Tools folder.
The Admin Tools MMC provides a dynamic status pane that shows a snapshot of Office Communications Server services. The status pane shows a high-level status of Office Communications Server services that is useful for monitoring. The status pane is detailed enough to help an administrator quickly troubleshoot a problem with a server.
To view the status of a server, simply select the server from the scope pane on the left side of the Office Communications Server Admin Tools MMC interface (shown in Figure 13-1). Because there is a lot of information to display, the settings are organized logically and grouped in a list that can be expanded by clicking the plus sign (+) next to each group setting.
The Admins Tools MMC can display the status of more than individual servers. It can show the status at the pool level as well as at the Active Directory forest and domain levels.
The status pane for a pool node displays a unique tab specific to pools. This is the Database tab. It provides a convenient interface to query user data from the back-end SQL server. In previous versions, administrators who wanted to examine the user data stored in the SQL database needed to write SQL commands. This interface eliminates this learning curve. The following information can be queried directly from this tab:
Number of active endpoints logged in to the pool
Client versions of active endpoints logged in
Data for a specific user, by specifying the user's SIP URI
Conference summary reports
The Database tab view is shown in Figure 13-2.
When the Forest node is selected, the status pane displays the global settings. Figure 13-3 displays the status pane for the forest node.
To view status at the domain level, the default view must be changed to show Active Directory Domains (as shown in Figure 13-4). This is done by right-clicking the top node in the scope pane and selecting View Options, which is shown in Figure 13-4. The Admins Tools MMC must be restarted to view this mode.
In addition to the overall status for a particular functionality or a service, the status pane also provides information about fully qualified domain names (FQDNs) of servers, file URLs, static Internet Protocol (IP) routes, and port numbers that can be used as a reference. It is also an effective display of configuration for the purposes of troubleshooting. The amount of information that is displayed here is sufficient for an overall view of Office Communication Server's status.
Typically, to monitor events, the administrator launches the Event Viewer MMC, selects the Application log, and filters out all events that are not specific to Office Communications Server. This effort can become tedious and time-consuming. This is no longer necessary. The Admins Tools MMC provides a viewer of Office Communications Server events. The Event Log tab is visible only when a server node is selected in the scope pane. It displays the recent Office Communications Server events for the selected server node. The Event Log tab in the Admins Tools MMC is an integrated event viewer that filters all Office Communications Server–specific events.
The administrator can further filter events as shown in Figure 13-5.
You can customize the view of the information displayed in the Event Log tab according to your monitoring requirements by using the following filters:
Event Category
Event Type
Date and Time
Number of maximum records to display (defaults to 10 records)
The events can be sorted in descending chronological order by selecting the Most Recent Events First option. Deselecting this option will display the events in ascending order.
The categories map to the different server roles installed on the server. This arrangement makes it easy to hone in on a faulty service. Events for Office Communications Server 2007 are classified in the following categories:
Front End Components
Voice Applications
Server Applications
IM and Telephony Conferencing
Archiving and CDR
Management
Deployment
The Office Communications Server events are classified as follows:
Information These events are for informational purposes only.
Warning These events can indicate abnormal behavior in some component. Such behavior might require your immediate attention.
Error These events typically indicate a failure in one of the core components or functionality that requires your immediate attention.
The type of events can easily be recognized by their respective icons. For example, the Informational icon is a small blue 'i' on a white background. The warning is a yellow triangle with an exclaimation point. The error message is marked by a red circle with an exclaimation point.
The Admins Tools MMC integrates the same functionality of the Performance Monitor (PerfMon) MMC by embedding it within the status pane. This is shown in Figure 13-6.
By default, specific performance counters were preselected that will give an overall view of the server's health. By providing over 300 performance counters in Office Communications Server 2007, the engineering team has already done the work of selecting the right set of performance counters that should be monitored.
The performance counters exposed in the MMC are read from the file, ServerPerfMon.xml, at run time. This file includes the performance counters for each server role. The administrator can modify the list of performance counters to monitor by modifying this file. This file is located at
%ProgramFiles%Common FilesMicrosoft Office Communications Server 2007
Note
For a list of Office Communications Server performance counters, see Appendix C, on the companion CD in the folder Appendixes,Scripts,Resources.
MMC for Office Communications Server 2007 exposes the standard controls (toolbar buttons) for Performance Monitor. Table 13-1 describes the PerfMon toolbar buttons shown on the toolbar in Figure 13-6 and listed from left to right:
Table 13-1. Performance Monitor Toolbar Buttons