eG Monitoring
 

Measures reported by Exc2013AssistDbTest

The Microsoft Exchange Mailbox Assistants service performs background processing of mailboxes in the Exchange store. It provides functionality for Calendar Attendant, Resource Booking Attendant, Out of Office Assistant, and Managed Folder Mailbox Assistant.

The Exchange Assistants can be either event-based Assistants or time-based Assistants. The event-based Assistants start to process mailboxes on the occurrence of an event, such as on a change of Out-of-Office (OOF) information in one or more mailboxes. The time-based Assistants process the mailboxes periodically. Each time-based Assistant deploys an Assistants Driver that periodically checks whether the current time is within a specified time window. When the current time reaches the specified time window, the Assistants Driver invokes the corresponding time-based Assistant. The time-based Assistant then obtains a list of mailboxes from the database and starts to process them.

Latencies in background processing can adversely impact a user's experience with his/her Exchange mailbox. If this is to be avoided, administrators should keep an eye on the activities of every assistant on each of the mailboxes it processes, isolate potential processing slowdowns, and identify the mailboxes that will be affected. This is where the Exc2013AssistDbTest test helps.

This test auto-discovers the mailbox assistants at work and the mailbox databases they are working on. For each assistant, the test reports the time taken by that assistant to process events and mailboxes, and thus reveals bottlenecks in processing.

The measures made by this test are as follows:

Measurement Description Measurement Unit Interpretation
Avg_evt_pro Indicates the average time taken by this assistant for processing events chosen as interesting. Secs Ideally, the value of this measure should be less than 2 minutes (i.e., 120 seconds). A very high value indicates that there are many events in queue with long waiting times. This in turn indicates a processing bottleneck.
Avg_mail_pro Indicates the average processing time of mailboxes for time-based assistants. Secs A low value is desired for this measure, as high values are indicative of delays in processing.
Et_db_updat Indicates the time elapsed (in seconds) since the last attempt made by this assistant to update the list of databases. Minutes  
Et_evt_pool Indicates the time elapsed (in seconds) since the last event was polled by this assistant for this database. Secs  
Et_evt_att Indicates the time elapsed (in seconds) since the last attempt made by this assistant to poll events for this database. Secs  
Evt_in_que Indicates the current number of events in the in-memory queue of this database waiting to be processed by this assistant. Number Ideally, the value of this measure should be low at all times. High values may indicate a performance bottleneck.
Mail_pro Indicates the number of mailboxes processed by this assistant. Number  
Mail_pro_sec Indicates the rate at which this assistant processed mailboxes. Processed/Sec Ideally, the value of this measure should be high at all times. Low values may indicate a performance bottleneck.