eG Monitoring
 

Measures reported by Exc2013OWAPerTest

Microsoft Outlook Web App lets users access their Exchange mailbox from almost any Web browser. In environments that span geographies or in enterprises with a liberal work culture, you will find many users accessing their mailboxes from remote locations world-wide using Outlook Web App. Moreover, in such environments, you will also find user-to-user communication enabled through an integration of Instant Messaging (IM) and OWA. To ensure a high quality user experience with the Exchange server, administrators of such environments should make sure that remote users do not complain of slowdowns / failures when accessing their mailboxes or when communicating with each other. For this, administrators should track the remote session load on OWA and IM services, gauge how well these services handle the load, proactively detect probable slowdowns in responsiveness, and fix the problem before users register a complaint with help desk. This is where the Exc2013OWAPerTest test helps.

This test tracks the requests for OWA and IM services, measures the time taken by the Exchange server to service these requests, and brings even the slightest dips in responsiveness and the smallest of failures to the attention of administrators. This way, the test sheds light on processing bottlenecks that the OWA / IM services may be experiencing.

The measures made by this test are as follows:

Measurement Description Measurement Unit Interpretation
Avg_resp_tim Indicates the average time that elapsed between the beginning and end of an OEH or ASPX request. Secs A high value for this measure is indicative of a bottleneck when processing requests to the OWA service.

The detailed diagnosis of this measure, if enabled, reveals the PID of the worker process that is hogging the CPU resources and causing responsiveness to deteriorate.

Avg_srch_tim Indicates the average time that elapsed while waiting for a search to complete. Secs A high value indicates a searching bottleneck.
Cur_pro_user Indicates the number of users who are currently logged on whose mailbox access is being proxied to another server. Number  
Cur_users Indicates the number of users who are currently signed in to Outlook Web App. Number This is a good measure of the load on OWA.
Fail_req_sec Indicates the rate at which OWA requests failed. Reqs/Sec A very low value is desired for this measure. A high value is a cause for concern.
Im_mgs_rec Indicates the rate at which instant messages were received by the server. Msgs/Sec These measures are good indicators of the load on the IM service.
Im_msg_sent Indicates the rate at which instant messages were sent by the server. Msgs/Sec
Im_sign_fail Indicates the percentage of the last 100 users who failed to sign in to the Instant Messaging server. Percent A value close to 100% is a cause for concern, as it indicates that almost all sign-in attempts in the recent past have failed. The reasons for the anomaly will have to be investigated.
Im_sign_fails Indicates the number of attempts to sign in to Instant Messaging that have failed since the service was started. Number A non-zero value is desired for this measure.
Tot_msg_fail Indicates the number of attempts to deliver instant messages that have failed since the service was started. Number A non-zero value is desired for this measure.
Tot_msg_rec Indicates the number of instant messages that were received since the service was started. Number  
Tot_msg_sent Indicates the total number of instant messages that were sent since the service was started. Number  
Im_user_signin Indicates the number of users who are currently signed in to Instant Messaging in Outlook Web App. Number This is a good indicator of the current workload of the IM service.
Logon_sec Indicates the rate at which OWA user sessions were created. Sessions/sec  
Pro_user_req Indicates the number of proxied requests made per second. Reqs/Sec  
Req_tim_out Indicates the number of requests that timed out. Number A timeout can occur if there is already one request running from the same user and the new requests from that user could not wait longer than the configured context lock time-out period. The default timeout period setting is 3 seconds.

If the value of this measure is very high, it indicates a large number of time outs. You may want to consider resetting the context lock time-out period to reduce this number.
Req_sec Indicates the rate at which requests were serviced by OWA. Reqs/Sec A high value is desired for this measure. A consistent drop in this value is indicative of a processing bottleneck.
Cur_uni_user Indicates the number of unique users currently signed in to Outlook Web App. Number