These days the health of corporate mail servers sometimes seems almost as important as the health of the company CEO.
When mail service is down, business slows and telephones ring incessantly in the corporate data center. Later this month, two vendors will set out to make those phones ring less often. Tally Systems and MessageWise will ship upgraded products for monitoring mail servers.
Tally is readying MailCheck 4.3, which runs on Windows 3.11, 95 and NT. Version 4.3 adds a feature called Star Polling that enables companies to monitor mail delivery between any two servers, whereas previously the software only let companies monitor mail delivery between servers and a central hub server.
Tally also will integrate its IP Check into MailCheck to monitor the health of IP-based transport devices, such as routers or gateways. In addition, Tally is including a Java-based management console that runs in a Web browser.
"We can now traverse our entire wide-area mail network and compile monthly reports on availability and response time," says Michael Green, messaging analyst for Thomson Financial in Boston. He says the monitoring system uses a red light/green light display to report the health of his servers, which he polls every 15 minutes.
Green is using MailCheck to monitor Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes servers, but the software can monitor nearly any mail server, including Lotus cc:Mail, Novell GroupWise, Netscape Mail, X.400 and Native Simple Mail Transfer Protocol/Post Office Protocol systems.
Early next year, Tally plans to add performance-monitoring tools to MailCheck, which costs $11,000 for 5,000 users.
Focus on performance
Performance monitoring is the area in which MessageWise is focusing its efforts. With Version 3.0 of Messaging Manager's Assistant (2MA), which is designed for Microsoft Exchange, MessageWise has added a set of monitoring templates. This is a collection of objects to be monitored, including queues, processor utilization and disk space usage. The templates, which can be used to collect performance data or monitor events, also can be customized for rollouts to large sets of similarly configured servers.
Harold Dyck, president of MessageWise, says 2MA can monitor thousands of Exchange servers regardless of location.
MessageWise also has added Web reporting tools, an Add Server Wizard and SNMP support to 2MA, which does not require agents on every mail server. Pricing on 2MA 3.0, expected to ship by year-end, starts at $1,000.
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