CSI's Paladin Remote Monitoring solution uncovered two major Exchange 2010 email crisises in the span of an hour on Wednesday. One affected a little under 700 users and the other about 1350 users.
The first event was that Paladin gave us an Exchange alert called "back pressure". This is where Exchange believes that it is going to be unable to do its job based upon the rate of server resources (RAM and disk space) it is consuming. Exchange then attempts to protect the core. The thing it generally does first is shutdown email flow into and out of the Exchange server. This begs the questions, "how do you know if emails you sent are not being delivered? How do you know if emails sent do you are not being received? Paladin knows. Since CSI actively watches the alert consoles and doesn't solely rely on automated alerting to our clients, we went "old school" and picked up the phone talked to the appropriate person who didn't know they were not getting emails. We worked with them to resolve the issue. A simple resource allocation change of their virtual environment and a quick reboot and those 700 users continue to do what they do without worrying about, "why is email down?".
When we combine Paladin Monitoring with Paladin Email Defense, we can do one better. Paladin Email Defense provides us 24x7x365 SMS text alerts when mail flow into and out of an email server stops and starts. If the outage is due to true disaster situation, Paladin Email Defense immediately switches into a disaster recovery mode where the clients inbound email that cannot be delivered to their mail server is immediately available via the web. The mail server may be dead or the building destroyed, but if you can find internet access somewhere, you still be able to send and receive critical emails until whatever bad happened is resolved. If the situation is temporary, Paladin Email Defense will just restart the inbound and outbound mail flow automatically as soon as the connection is re-established and then notify everyone via SMS that normal mail flow is working again.
The second Exchange event happened an hour after the first event. Unfortunately an Exchange server which provides access to approximately 1,350 users had a high CPU condition. This was causing degraded user performance. There was no warning. One minute it was normal. The next minute it was in a bad place. Paladin alerted us. We were already looking into the outage when the phone rang from the customer reporting strange performance issues in Exchange. In this instance we couldn't prevent a degradation in performance. No one can do that all the time. However, we knew before our client knew that there was an urgent issue. We were proactively working to resolve the issue as fast as possible to minimize downtime. About 20 minutes after the event started we had it resolved and everyone went back to work. Our response time from alert to action on this critical alert was about three minutes.
It is impossible to know everything that is going on, or about to go on, with your network. By overlaying 24x7x365 Paladin remote monitoring we can provide you with the ability to know things about your network that are impossible to know on your own. By overlaying Paladin Email Defense we can provide an added layer of disaster recovery protection for your critical email communications.
How do you know what you don't know about your network?
Put CSI's Paladin Monitoring combined with our 35 years of experience working with technology for you today.
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