I measure round trip with a bit of powershell, very straight forward. We're an MSP so on an entirely separate mail domain, but you could replicate this from an internal account with a gmail account or similar.
I automatically send every half hour from our mailserver using the powershell 'Send-Mailmessage' cmdlet, the subject contains a time stamp. The mailbox I send to at our client is set to auto reply and delete. This powershell then runs a DO UNTIL loop using the script I lifted wholesale from here: https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/exchange/en-US/d5707d5b-e1ff-4811-a3d0-552bb0b00444/verify-receiving-emails-from-powershell I modified it slightly to only match the subject line of the sent mail. The DO loop has an incremental number counter ($INT++) and a Start-Sleep 1, I then use 'IF Incremental number -GT than 60' as a rough measure of 1 minute which in turn fires an alert email to our helpdesk team if exceeded. Honestly, its never caught anything prior to our other monitoring tools (Port 25 check, Queue Lengths and Service Status) but it could easily run more regularly, or be used to trap an average round trip time for quality measurement. Or keep it in the toolbox and when someone asks if there is a delay you can use it as a quick check. Patrick Patrick Whiteside | Senior Engineer | Blue256 - IT Solutions & Services Tel: 0845 458 00 90 | Fax: 0870 421 59 24 Web: blue256.co.uk Address: Blue256, Saxon House, Hellesdon Park Road, Norwich, NR6 5DR This email is confidential and may well also be privileged. If you have received it in error you are on notice of its status. Please notify us immediately by reply email and then delete this message from your system. Please do not copy it or use it for any other purpose, or disclose its content to any other person. To do so could be a breach of confidentiality. All emails and any attachments are believed to be virus free, however, all emails should be virus checked before being downloaded and we accept no responsibility therefore. Please contact our offices on 0845 458 00 90 or email [email protected] if you need assistance. Blue256 Limited Registered Office: Saxon House, Hellesdon Park Road, Drayton High Road, Norwich NR6 5DR Company Registration Number: 05015705 Company Registered in England and Wales -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Dave Lum Sent: 01 December 2014 19:52 To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [Exchange] RE: Monitor Ex2010: Looks compelling. What do others here use to monitor round trip time? I hate having my users tell me email doesn't work when all I can really do it look at Exchange queues and only hop to the SPAM filter when someone tells me they've been expecting something but haven't seen it... Dave > Ten bucks a month. Have not used them in a long time but they worked > well back in the old days. > > https://www.site24x7.com/mail-server-monitoring.html > > > From: [email protected] > [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Orlebeck, > Geoffrey > Sent: Monday, December 1, 2014 2:15 PM > To: '[email protected]' > Subject: [Exchange] Monitor Ex2010: > > Just had an issue over the weekend where two separate environments > running on top of our DMZ cluster stopped receiving external email > after a networking change on the ESX hosts. Both environments are > setup with one edge server and one HUB/CAS server (Ex2010 SP3 UR4 > across all VMs). Emails were timing out and senders were receiving 4.4.7 NDRs > from their servers. > Restarting the Microsoft Exchange Transport service allowed mail to > begin flowing again. We understand how/why the issue occurred, > however, none of our regular SCOM alerts flagged any issues (no queue > growth, ports are open, services were running, etc.). After the fact, > we noticed our 3rd party spam filter was receiving "Message refused" > errors. We are working with the vendor to see if we can setup a > baseline alert if/when this issue comes up, but from a strictly > Exchange perspective, we are lacking any alerting on an event such as this. > > I'm curious if anyone else has setup either a SCOM monitor or perhaps > PowerShell script for testing external connectivity for something like > this? I use the Exchange connectivity test a lot in troubleshooting, > but that has to be performed manually. We'd like to setup an automated > monitor confirming mail delivery and returning values based on > outcome. The part I'm trying to figure out is the external portion, > and how best to test against it, since all internal traffic was fine > and nothing on the server itself showed any obvious problems. I have > skimmed through a few of the logs on the Edge server but do not see > any real differences from pre/post ESX host change that caused email to stop > flowing. > > Any insight or even general direction is greatly appreciated. Thank you! > > -Geoff > Confidentiality Notice: This is a transmission from Community Hospital > of the Monterey Peninsula. This message and any attached documents may > be confidential and contain information protected by state and federal > medical privacy statutes. They are intended only for the use of the > addressee. If you are not the intended recipient, any disclosure, > copying, or distribution of this information is strictly prohibited. > If you received this transmission in error, please accept our > apologies and notify the sender. Thank you. > >
