There is a plethora of tools available to analyze logs on Web servers like Internet Information Server (IIS). These tools can help systems administrators determine what most of their access traffic consists of -- i.e., the most popular pages, the times of day when a site is accessed most often, total bandwidth used, and so on. The results can then be displayed in a series of graphs that are usually rendered as HTML.
But what about similar analytical applications for email servers? I've wondered about that myself, and have cast around to find a program that can provide the same type of monitoring, log file analysis and statistical reporting for Microsoft Exchange Server.
As it turns out, such a utility does indeed exist: ADVSoft MailDetective.
MailDetective can work with conventional SMTP servers, such as QMail and Sendmail, as well as Exchange 2000 and Exchange 2003.
It comes in two basic iterations:
MailDetective will analyze your Exchange Server log files and create reports by various criteria -- mail server, time of day, day of the week, internal email address, external domain. It also lets you group and sort your results in various ways -- graphs can be flat tables, charts, or a mixture of each; and all can be saved as templates and reused as needed.
For MailDetective to work with Exchange Server, Exchange Server's message tracking feature has to be enabled. In addition, MailDetective
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must have access to your Exchange server's log directory.
The program can be run either interactively from a GUI with wizards, or from the command line using a console version of the program to run an existing report. This way, reports can be run non-interactively from a scheduler or on-demand from a script.
Each edition of the program can be downloaded and evaluated for 30 days; a 25-mailbox license for MailDetective is $199, with discounts available for bigger needs.
About the author: Serdar Yegulalp is editor of the Windows Power Users Newsletter.
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Reference Center: Exchange Server monitoring and logging tips
