| Author |
Message |
Guest
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 Posted:
Thu Dec 22, 2005 9:58 am Post subject:
How can we get a break down of where the increase in the siz |
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We have a Windows 2000 \ Exchange 2000 network. Yesterday our backup of
the Exchange Information Store grew by a massive 3 GB. We need to be
able to see immediately, where this extra data is so we can swoop on
the culprits. Is there any way to do this, except for going through the
storage groups in Exchange System Manager and clicking on each instance
of Mailboxes? This tells us the size of individual mailboxes, but tells
us nothing of new mails from the previous 24 hours, or to growth trends
in general.
Many thanks,
QH
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Kentucky
Guest
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| Posted:
Thu Dec 22, 2005 4:16 pm Post subject:
Re: How can we get a break down of where the increase in the |
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| Defragment the Databases |
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Neil Hobson [MVP]
Guest
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| Posted:
Thu Dec 22, 2005 5:58 pm Post subject:
Re: How can we get a break down of where the increase in the |
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MOM 2005 comes with a handy 'Highest Growth Mailboxes' report which will
help in such scenarios where you need to see whose mailbox has grown over a
period of X days or weeks. You might be able to ascertain the culprits via
message tracking.
--
Neil Hobson
Exchange MVP
For Exchange news, links, and tips, check:
http://www.msexchangeblog.com
<quentinhudson@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:1135243980.857916.307850@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com...
| Quote: | We have a Windows 2000 \ Exchange 2000 network. Yesterday our backup of
the Exchange Information Store grew by a massive 3 GB. We need to be
able to see immediately, where this extra data is so we can swoop on
the culprits. Is there any way to do this, except for going through the
storage groups in Exchange System Manager and clicking on each instance
of Mailboxes? This tells us the size of individual mailboxes, but tells
us nothing of new mails from the previous 24 hours, or to growth trends
in general.
Many thanks,
QH
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Guest
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| Posted:
Fri Dec 23, 2005 5:45 pm Post subject:
Re: How can we get a break down of where the increase in the |
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Thanks for your responses guys. MOM is out of the question as its vast
expense is not appropriate for our modest charity. As for defragmenting
the data - do you mean through isinteg? How will this give us a break
down of where sudden growth spurts occurr?
Cheers. |
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Susan
Guest
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| Posted:
Tue Dec 27, 2005 5:58 pm Post subject:
Re: How can we get a break down of where the increase in the |
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you defrag with eseutil.exe, but that most likely will not help, at all, and
it won't tell you where this huge increase came from. how are your backups
configured? full every night?
--
Susan Conkey [MVP]
<quentinhudson@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:1135338352.862600.226340@g44g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
| Quote: | Thanks for your responses guys. MOM is out of the question as its vast
expense is not appropriate for our modest charity. As for defragmenting
the data - do you mean through isinteg? How will this give us a break
down of where sudden growth spurts occurr?
Cheers.
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Mary Patricia
Guest
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| Posted:
Tue Dec 27, 2005 5:58 pm Post subject:
Re: How can we get a break down of where the increase in the |
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For the defragment, you want eseutil instead of isinteg:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;192185
If you do not already have some monitoring tools installed, you are going to
have a lot of manual/grunt work ahead of you if you want to see where the
growth came from. Without any historical numbers, the only thing I can think
of is to use the Message Tracking tool and check for any irregularities such
as a giant message. But this is slow and painful going.
I'd recommend, if you are not already tracking mailbox sizes, you should
start now. This is not the fastest or prettiest method but it is free:
In Exchange System Manager, locate the store and expand it. Locate the
Mailboxes object underneath the store and select View-->Choose Columns.
Remove all the columns other than the display name/directory name, Size
(KB) and Deleted Items Size (KB). Then right-click the Mailboxes object and
select Export List. Export it to .csv format. You can then open it with
Excel, change the columns to read as numbers, throw in some math to convert
KB to MB, etc etc.
Once you get your formulas built, you can easily repeat the process
daily/weekly, whatever works for you, and compare your numbers. If you have
any Excel gurus at your disposal (I'm really lucky that I do), you can build
formulas that show you the % growth from day to day or week to week or
what-not.
Again, not the prettiest and not the easiest but it does get the basic need
met! |
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Guest
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| Posted:
Wed Dec 28, 2005 3:59 pm Post subject:
Re: How can we get a break down of where the increase in the |
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Thanks to Mary and Susan for the advice. We perform a full backup of
the information store every night (we do not backup individual
mailboxes though as this takes too long).
In Exchange 2003 are there monitoring tools for this sort of thing
included with the software itself, or are you still reliant on third
party solutions? |
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Susan
Guest
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| Posted:
Wed Dec 28, 2005 5:58 pm Post subject:
Re: How can we get a break down of where the increase in the |
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to track who might be sending or receiving an inordinate amount of email,
you really need to look at 3rd party solutions...it's not an easy thing to
track down...have you checked to see how much whitespace is in the affected
database?
--
Susan Conkey [MVP]
<quentinhudson@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:1135763977.676549.38780@o13g2000cwo.googlegroups.com...
| Quote: | Thanks to Mary and Susan for the advice. We perform a full backup of
the information store every night (we do not backup individual
mailboxes though as this takes too long).
In Exchange 2003 are there monitoring tools for this sort of thing
included with the software itself, or are you still reliant on third
party solutions?
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PC Chick
Guest
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| Posted:
Thu Dec 29, 2005 1:58 am Post subject:
Re: How can we get a break down of where the increase in the |
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Mary Patricia wrote:
| Quote: | For the defragment, you want eseutil instead of isinteg:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;192185
If you do not already have some monitoring tools installed, you are going to
have a lot of manual/grunt work ahead of you if you want to see where the
growth came from. Without any historical numbers, the only thing I can think
of is to use the Message Tracking tool and check for any irregularities such
as a giant message. But this is slow and painful going.
I'd recommend, if you are not already tracking mailbox sizes, you should
start now. This is not the fastest or prettiest method but it is free:
In Exchange System Manager, locate the store and expand it. Locate the
Mailboxes object underneath the store and select View-->Choose Columns.
Remove all the columns other than the display name/directory name, Size
(KB) and Deleted Items Size (KB). Then right-click the Mailboxes object and
select Export List. Export it to .csv format. You can then open it with
Excel, change the columns to read as numbers, throw in some math to convert
KB to MB, etc etc.
Once you get your formulas built, you can easily repeat the process
daily/weekly, whatever works for you, and compare your numbers. If you have
any Excel gurus at your disposal (I'm really lucky that I do), you can build
formulas that show you the % growth from day to day or week to week or
what-not.
Again, not the prettiest and not the easiest but it does get the basic need
met!
|
Mary's got a good suggestion there. That's basically what I do once a
month with my Exchange server at the non-profit where I work.
You also might consider setting message size limits and mailbox size
limits. If your mailboxes are set to 'unlimited', your users will
/never/ delete anything ever and you'll be on a treadmill of constantly
buying more drive space. Every time my users whine at me about running
out of space on their mailbox, I remind myself about the user whose 300
meg mailbox had 30 messages that legit and the rest was nothing but an
enormous collection of every stupid joke that she'd received since she
started working here.
Also, if you are using any type of content filtering (for instance, an
anti-spam solution), consider using it to block sending / receiving
executables, video and sound files. I'd bet money that the vast majority
of those types of files that your users send/receive are not job-related
in any way. Video attachments, especially, make for horrendously fat
messages.
It's not fun playing the role of the network police but you have to look
at it as protecting your server and therefore protecting your charity's
highly limited resources. |
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PC Chick
Guest
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| Posted:
Thu Dec 29, 2005 5:58 pm Post subject:
Re: How can we get a break down of where the increase in the |
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Oh, stupid stupid stupid me. Dunno why I didn't think of this yesterday
when I posted.
Another trick you can try (and you'll want to do this /after hours!/
because it will make your Exchange server very busy):
Logon to the console of your Exchange server with an Exchange admin
account.
Open Windows Explorer.
Cruise to your M: drive.
Go down to the MBX directory where all your private mailboxes are.
Right click and choose "Search".
Set your search to look for files that have been created in the last
blah-number of days (or, search for files created between date1 and
date2) and check the box to include subdirectories.
Start the search then get some coffee, a good book to read and get
comfortable, it's gonna be quite awhile, depending on how large your
private store is. If it's really really large, you might want to wait
until the weekend instead. |
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