In This Edition:
We know it's your worst nightmare... the email servers crash, the ERP application goes down on Monday morning, or the e-commerce system takes a nose dive the last day of the quarter. We've been in your shoes before. To prevent those heart stopping phone calls, late night pages, and panicky inquiries from the corner office, this month's newsletter is all about keeping your business-critical applications up and running and your boss smiling.
 Monitor Exchange Health with Our New Free Exchange Monitor... Did We Mention That It's New and FREE?
 Say hello to the newest free tool from SolarWinds: Exchange Monitor. You asked for more free monitoring tools and we delivered!
We all know that the email and calendaring services that Microsoft® Exchange Server provides are critical when it comes to your business. And we know how your phone lights up like a Christmas tree when Exchange fails you. That's why we came up with an easy way for you to keep a vigilant eye on Exchange health.
SolarWinds free Exchange Monitor delivers a clever desktop dashboard that continuously monitors Exchange to deliver real-time insight into services, mail queue sizes, and host server health. With Exchange Monitor at your fingertips, you'll be able to track Exchange health at-a-glance and ensure this mission-critical app never fails you... plus, the Exchange Monitor offers up some fancy desktop eye candy with its 21st century transparency mode, impresses your boss, and ensures the happiness of your Exchange server, so you're assured to be the envy of your fellow IT administrators.
SolarWinds Exchange Monitor makes it easy to:
- Quickly identify and troubleshoot Exchange server problems
- Spot growing mail queues that can indicate bigger issues, like transport failures, Internet connection failures, and virus activity
- Leverage out-of-the-box settings to start monitoring Exchange immediately
- Prevent performance issues before they impact users with built-in red, yellow, and green health indicators
- Monitor critical server health indicators, including disk space, CPU utilization, and memory utilization
Download the Free Exchange Monitor Today >
 Get Turnkey Monitoring in Just Minutes for Active Directory, SQL Server, Web, and More
SolarWinds free Exchange Monitor gives you great at-a-glance insight into the health of your Exchange server. We find that this easy-to-access information can be very addictive, causing you to ask "how can I get more data about the health of my other critical apps?"
If you find yourself wanting more (and we know you do), we've got the solution for you. SolarWinds ipMonitor delivers out-of-the-box, turnkey network monitoring that tells you exactly what's happening with your applications, servers, and network devices. In fact, ipMonitor ships with more than 50 preconfigured monitors for applications and network gear like routers, switches, and servers.
 ipMonitor's preconfigured monitors collect and analyze critical health metrics for each application, indicating availability, performance, and service quality. Out-of-the box monitoring platforms and protocols include Active Directory®, DNS, Microsoft® Exchange, Microsoft SQL Servera?￠, FTP, Web, and more. Other ipMonitor highlights include:
- Quickly discovers your network and automatically recommends SmartMonitor settings for each device
- Monitors end-user experience with synthetic transactions
- Automates recovery and remediation actions to reduce downtime
- Leverages SNMP, WMI, and RPC for agent-less network monitoring of critical applications and systems
Try ipMonitor Free >
 Have the Troubleshooting Tools You Need to Diagnose Disasters... Quickly and Painlessly
 When disaster does strike, you need every advantage on your side to get the problem fixed... fast. That means having the troubleshooting tools at your fingertips to quickly get to the root of the issue. We recommend keeping SolarWinds Engineer's Toolset nearby for just those occasions.
Here are just a few wrenches in Engineer's Toolset that can help you restore happiness to your network and applications:
- NetFlow Realtime Tool: This real-time capture and analysis tool stores up to one hour of Cisco NetFlow data and can simplify troubleshooting network congestion issues by revealing who and what are eating up all of your network bandwidth.
- Network Performance Monitor: A perennial favorite, this invaluable tool tracks network health indicators and can instantly alert you to problems with availability, bandwidth utilization, CPU load, memory and disk space utilization on hundreds of network elements.
- Cisco Config Tools: This collection of Cisco router and switch configuration tools makes it fast and easy to compare configuration data for faster diagnosis of router/switch config issues.
Try Engineer's Toolset Free >
Sneak Peek: SolarWinds Certification for You Smarty-Pants, Network-Engineering Types
 Are you a master of network management? Do you thrive on solving the most challenging issues? Pride yourself on keeping the network fine-tuned? Promote yourself by becoming a SolarWinds Certified Professional (SCP)!
SolarWinds will be introducing a SolarWinds certification program in the second half of 2008 and we want to invite you to sign up for early information on the certification program. Sneak peek benefits include helping to define an industry-recognized certification, getting early information on the program details, and even saving a few bucks on the test fees!
Sign Up Today for a Sneak Peek >
We have a fresh shipment of Thwack t-shirts ready for your wearing enjoyment. To get one of these brand-spankin' new shirts, all you have to do is spread the word about SolarWinds!
This month we are asking you to help us share Exchange Monitor with your fellow engineers, so download the new free tool and then post your thoughts to our Product Reviews Forum on Thwack, Tucows, Wikipedia, Download.com, your blog, or your favorite technology site!
Spread the Word Today >
Get your creative juices flowing with some of our favorite posts from your fellow engineers:
 "What a life saver... We purchased Orion about 5 years ago and I can say firsthand it has saved many hours of driving and troubleshooting finding our problems." - Visualone
Try Orion Free for 30 Days >
"A great collection of essential tools... I have used SolarWinds [Engineer's Toolset] for years and I continue to find usefulness with its offerings. Tools such as the Advanced Subnet Calculator or the IP Address Management should be in every network engineer's toolkit." - rollingsr
Try Engineer's Toolset Free for 30 Days >
Product Tip: Top 5 Tips to Keep Your Exchange Servers Happy
Since this newsletter introduces our new Exchange Monitor and is all about keeping your business-critical apps running at peak performance, one of our product managers ponied up five tips for keeping Exchange happy. So enjoy... and be sure to implement!
 It sounds really simple, but your Exchange Server's happiness largely depends on the health of critical supporting Windows services, such as Exchange Information Store, Exchange MTA Stacks, Exchange Routing Engine, Exchange System Attendant, Simple Mail Transport Protocol (SMTP), and World Wide Web Publishing Service. Exchange will do nothing by default when one of these services stop, so it's up to you to ensure that they don't!
 You'll definitely want to keep an eye on your critical Exchange mail queues. If any of your mail queues grow continuously for 10 minutes or more, this usually indicates that a message transport has failed, an Internet connection has gone down, or someone is using your server to send spam.
 As you are well aware, Exchange is a disk hog and, if you forget about this, you could quickly run out of disk space. You'll also want to monitor the size of your Information Store to ensure that you aren't bumping up against your maximum size limits. For Exchange 2003 Standard with SP2, the Information Store maximum size is only 18 GB by default, but you can increase this to as much as 75 GB using a registry key.
 You should never forget about CPU and memory resources on your server. It is normal for CPU utilization to spike to 100%, but sustained spikes over 80% means either your Exchange server is misbehaving or you should be moving to a more powerful server.
 In addition to monitoring Exchange mail queue length counters, you'll also want to watch Exchange counters like RPC average latency and RPC requests; these counters indicate email issues that will likely result in users standing outside your office. These counters can also serve as a warning sign that bottlenecks in the network, CPU, disk or memory are affecting Exchange performance.
Download the Free Exchange Monitor Today >
Product Updates
 Free SolarWinds Exchange Monitor v1.0
SolarWinds newest free tool, Exchange Monitor, delivers a clever desktop dashboard that continuously monitors Exchange to deliver real-time insight into services, mail queue sizes, and host server health.
Download Exchange Monitor Today >
Recent Service Packs Available for Download
A number of service packs are now available for download from the support area of the SolarWinds website. Download them today!
Orion NetFlow Traffic Analyzer - Service Pack 1 >
Engineer's Toolset v9.2 SNMP Graph - Hot Fix 1 >
Engineer's Toolset v9.2 TFTP Server - Hot Fix 2 >
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