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MOM Exchange Management Pack alerts

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Part of my job involves supporting the Exchange Management Pack for Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM).  In doing so, we sometimes come across things that don't really make a lot of sense (or at least they don't to me).  Take the following scenario.

With MOM, you can create Mailboxes that MOM then uses to make sure it can log on to at specified intervals.  This is performed via a simple MAPI logon.  The Exchange Management Pack has a script that performs this action, and it triggers by default every 15 minutes.  When you deploy and configure the Exchange Management Pack, you can choose to create a mailbox for the entire server (per-server monitoring), or you can create a separate mailbox for every single mailbox store.

When the MAPI logon script runs, it logs an event based on the result.  The expected result is obviously a Success, but if it fails, there are several different reasons this could be occurring.  Many of these errors are easy to interpret, and have prescribed actions that can be done to troubleshoot/fix the issue.

One event that may get logged is a MAPI logon failure because the logon timed out.  At first glance, that may not really make sense - if a logon is going to work, it is going to work.  Keep in mind, however, that MOM uses scripts to perform the tests, and we could simply be dealing with the script taking a long time to run.  This results in a sort of false-positive.  The MAPI logon doesn't actually fail, and no clients are reporting issues, yet you have this glaring error in your MOM console.

The default timeout for the script itself is 30 seconds.  While this is sufficient in most cases, there may be circumstances where 30 seconds is insufficient, and is resulting in the script timing out (even if it is almost done...), which then results in the error being logged to MOM.  The solution is to modify the MAPI logon script itself and increase the timeout value.  In the script, you will find a line

var TIME_OUT_THRESHOLD = 30000

If you change the threshold to a higher value - 90000, the errors will go away because you are giving the script more time to run.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    PMMiller, You edit the MAPI Logon Script on the MOM server itself.  The setting will then get pushed out to the Exchange servers.  In the MOM Administrator console, go under Microsoft Exchange Server -Exchange 2003 --Availability and State Monitoring ---MAPI Logon Check and Availability Reporting ----Event Rules Then go to the properties of the rule "Check mailbox store availability - MAPI logon test" Go to the Responses Tab, highlight the script, then click Edit.  Click Edit again once the script comes up, then click on the Script tab.  You can then copy the entire contents of the script to a Text file (which you can search), and edit it there, then paste it back in, or if you are adventurous, you can wade through the script in the current location. One thing to note is that this only applies to MOM 2005.  The process is completely different for Ops Mgr 2007.

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    Question from a OpsMgr newbie.  Where did you edit the script (on each server or a central location)?

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    How-to: Connect your Windows Mobile device to an Exchange server (WM5) Microsoft Publicly Posts Additional