eG Monitoring
 

Measures reported by Exc2013SmtpRecTest

Exchange 2013 servers running the Transport service require Receive connectors to receive messages from the Internet, from email clients, and from other email servers. If a mailbox user complains that he/she is unable to receive certain messages or is receiving messages slowly, very often the source of such problems would be the receive connectors. Administrators should hence be able to figure out instantly which receive connector could probably be contributing to this problem condition and why – could it be because the receive connector is getting choked owing to an overload? Or is the connector rejecting too many messages owing to a size limit violation? The Exc2013SmtpRecTest test provides accurate answers to these questions.

This test auto-discovers the SMTP Receive Connectors and for each connector reports the load on that connector and the number of messages rejected by that connector. This way, the test points to connectors that are overloaded and those that are rejecting too many messages.

The measures made by this test are as follows:

Measurement Description Measurement Unit Interpretation
Byte_rec_sec Indicates the rate at which data was received by this connector. KB/sec A high value over a period is indicative of an excessive use of the SMTP server. Under such circumstances, compare the value of this measure across receive connectors to know which connector is contributing to the heavy load on the SMTP server.
Conn_cur Indicates the number of inbound connections to this receive connector. Number The value of this measure indicates the connection load imposed by the send connectors of the Front End Transport service and the Transport service on the same Exhange 2013 server, and the Transport and Mailbox Transport services on external Mailbox servers. In the event of a connection overload, you may want to compare the value of this measure across receive connectors, to know to which receive connector the send connectors are connecting often.
Msg_rec_sec Indicates the rate at which messages are received by this receive connector. Msgs/Sec Compare the value of this measure across receive connectors to know which receive connector is receiving a steady flow of messages. In the event of an overload, this measure will lead you to the exact connector that could be experiencing the overload.
Msg_refuse_siz Indicates the number of messages rejected by this connector because of a size restriction. Number If the message quota of a receive connector is set too low, then you will have too many messages to the connector getting rejected. To avoid this, you may want to reconfigure the message size quota of the connector with the highest rejection quotient. To identify the connector, compare the value of this measure across receive connectors.