Email Monitoring Software and Mail Server Monitoring Tool
Monitor email server performance from an end user’s perspective
Monitor email server performance from an end user’s perspective
Monitor email performance using out-of-the-box mail server monitoring tools, which lets you see behavior patterns leading to poor service. SolarWinds® Server & Application Monitor (SAM) is designed to provide comprehensive visibility into the end-user experience for Microsoft Outlook Web Access and other top web email clients.
The following built-in mail server monitors in SAM are designed to provide insight into behavior patterns leading to poor service, which includes the ability to test successful email delivery and round-trip time for the following mail protocols:
- MAPI: SAM can send an email through your SMTP server and verify it was delivered to an email account on your Exchange server.
- POP3: SAM can test the time it takes an email to complete a round trip from your SMTP mail server to a POP3 account.
- IMAP4: SAM can simulate an email roundtrip to test the ability of your SMTP server to receive and distribute email, and the ability of users to retrieve messages from IMAP4-enabled email clients.
Use a mail monitor to plan for mailbox database capacity
Use a mail monitor to plan for mailbox database capacity
Server & Application Monitor mail server monitoring tool is built to automatically collect mailbox database statistics and provide out-of-the-box alerts for Exchange Server, which can allow you to more easily plan for mailbox database capacity issues.
SAM is designed for you to:
- Manage high rates of incoming emails, MAPI operations, and POP3 requests
- Identify sudden email traffic spikes and any email server CPU bottlenecks
- Diagnose replication, storage, RPC requests, and database capacity issues in minutes
- Troubleshoot mail server problems using real-time and historical performance data
To quickly determine mailbox database capacity, SAM allows you to view the database size, space used, total mailboxes, and the average mailbox size. If a database is nearing its capacity limit, you can view its users by mailbox size table to determine if one or more users are consuming the space, and whether these users could be moved to another database to balance load and capacity.
Manage email issues with mail server monitoring tools
Manage email issues with mail server monitoring tools
SAM’s DIY deployment wizard is built to get you up and monitoring your email servers in about an hour.
By monitoring mail servers, SAM can make it easier to investigate email issues with its ability to drill down into user information. For example, instead of running a script to find usage details for a specific user after reporting an email issue, you can find user details by typing the user’s name into the search bar in the "Users By % Mailbox Quota Used" widget. Within seconds, you can troubleshoot the user’s issue in Exchange. By drilling into the user’s details, you can view the number and size of mailbox attachments, mailbox synced devices, and sent/received mail trends, which can help indicate a spam issue with the user’s account.
With this information, you can also report on user mailbox details to help clean up the mailbox database. For example, you can quickly create a mail monitor report on users who haven’t logged on during the past month. If your company uses a chargeback system based on usage, you can use the web-based reporting feature to email a report of mailbox space usage by user to business unit managers.
Incorporate automated alerting to speed email monitoring
Incorporate automated alerting to speed email monitoring
Relying on multiple dashboards or manual methods of monitoring email server performance can leave business operations vulnerable to potential downtime. For SMTP and transmission-related setbacks, SAM is built with the ability to alert administrators on server problems in real-time.
SAM allows you to set up alerts for end users when they’re approaching their mailbox quota. These alerts can also provide information about each end user’s mailbox, including the number and size of attachments and information about how to reduce mailbox size. This automation is designed to help you create the most efficient email server and save admin time by putting the responsibility of mailbox size reduction back on the end user.
Get More on Email Monitoring
What is email monitoring?
Email monitoring software, also known as mail server monitoring software, is a broad set of tools used to keep mail servers running smoothly. Successful email monitoring can support your ability to send and receive emails, even in large volumes, with minimal complications in the delivery and storage process.
How does email monitoring work?
The most basic understanding of the email delivery process isn’t much different than the delivery process used for traditional mail—there’s a sender, a postman, and a delivery. Monitoring a mail server works by tracking the performance of mail transfer protocols, storage, sender-end, and user-end server processes alongside server performance for potential issues:
- Sender-end protocol – First, there is a sender-end processing server, called an SMTP server, the equivalent of the post office where you would drop off your letter. An SMTP server is the initial computing device that starts off an email’s delivery journey. SMTP stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, a universal home base for email delivery systems, regardless of the user-end protocol. SMTP parameters set the standards for your mail server address. However, SMTP is just like any other computer—it can face bottlenecks and capacity issues if overloaded with data. Email monitoring tools can help you identify and resolve SMTP server capacity issues and transfer data by providing traffic monitoring and alerts.
- Internet mail delivery – After the initial SMTP “postman,” an internet-based mail delivery agent (MDA) picks up mail from your SMTP server and assigns it to recipient mailboxes. This mail transfer process doesn’t require a separate server, but it’s important to make sure the internet delivery process is assigning mail to user-end servers at an appropriate speed. Email monitoring tools can help identify spikes in volume of both delivered and undelivered messages.
- User-end protocol – The last software operation in the mail delivery process is the IMAP/POP3 server, which is usually configured with a POP3 or IMAP IP address. An IMAP/POP3 connection allows users to send and receive their emails. Email monitoring software can help ensure mail servers are available, and emails are being sent and retrieved properly to reduce potential business interruptions.
Why is email monitoring important?
Since email remains a critical business function for both internal and external communication, email server monitoring is crucial for administrators and users to help ensure business emails are sent promptly and securely without overloading the network.
Email monitoring is designed to provide insights to help prevent and quickly resolve mail server issues that can lead to lost revenue caused by mail exchange server performance issues or outages, including:
- Emails “bouncing back” or are undelivered are both unprofessional and unproductive
- Email security risks pose an unacceptable but common threat to business security overall
- The ability to maintain a smooth email delivery process, even in the face of major data transfer and large message stores
- If email delivery speed starts to decline, an email monitoring tool can help you detect and diagnose the location of the storage bottleneck before it wreaks havoc on your server
- If a mail account on your server is nearing full capacity, a mail server monitoring tool can let you know before the account malfunctions
- If an account on your server is unable to receive new emails, monitoring can help pinpoint exactly what steps you should take to get back on your feet and ensure the email system continues to function as needed for business productivity
What does an email monitor do?
Email monitoring software takes a multi-pronged approach to server monitoring by specifically focusing on capacity, protocol, and traffic performance and how they affect the overall performance of a mail server.
Server capacity monitoring is the process of making sure your email server is equipped to handle potentially large loads of data without stalling deliveries or potentially deleting items. Capacity is finite for each aspect of email server use, from the initial mail transfer agent to the user-end IMAP/POP3 server. An email monitoring tool should help you understand the capacity status at each step of the way.
To enhance communication between with other mail servers on the internet, a monitoring tool should be able to view and analyze performance details on both SMTP and Exchange Servers. Other transfer protocols can be streamlined with an email monitoring tool as well. Remote Procedure Call (RPC), for example, calls up services from other devices on the same network. An additional function to look for in an email monitoring tool is the ability to monitor and diagnose issues with client-server programs like RPC. In email transmission and storage, protocols every step of the way need to run smoothly. Email monitoring software should be able to test the time it takes for emails to complete their trip, then troubleshoot ways to shorten the process.
Managing traffic flow should be the final goal of any email monitoring tool. Sometimes email servers are burdened with a rapid influx of data, and it can be difficult for servers to mitigate bottlenecks in the CPU without major delays. A good mail server monitoring tool will be able to identify high-traffic moments and make capacity suggestions when a bottleneck seems likely.
How does email monitoring work in SAM?
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor offers comprehensive email monitoring software to help make sure your mail server is handling data efficiently during each step of the email transmission process.
SolarWinds SAM can provide drill-down, detail views about the availability and performance of a wide range of email server environments, including Microsoft Exchange Server, Lotus Domino Server, BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES), BlackBerry Delivery Confirmation, LDAP and DHCP user experience monitors, OpenLDAP, Microsoft Active Directory, and more. SAM is designed with a single dashboard to consolidate your device monitoring, which can allow you to access email performance and availability data, reporting, and a built-in expert knowledge base to help you pinpoint and remediate performance issues across your environment.
What is email monitoring?
Email monitoring software, also known as mail server monitoring software, is a broad set of tools used to keep mail servers running smoothly. Successful email monitoring can support your ability to send and receive emails, even in large volumes, with minimal complications in the delivery and storage process.
Comprehensive email monitoring for reliability and security
Server & Application Monitor
- Use mail server monitoring to predict future capacity issues.
- Stay proactive about ensuring end-user experience and business productivity.
- Set custom alerts through the mail monitor, including alerts for end users.
Starts at
SAM, an Orion module, is built on the SolarWinds Platform