Emails are still one of the most used forms of communication of data, and Microsoft Exchange is a widely used email platform for various organizations around the world. Information is commonly passed to various email servers, mailboxes and databases, so ensuring the health of the Microsoft Exchange system should be a high priority task for any organization. This is where Exchange health mailboxes, also known as monitoring mailboxes, come in.
An Exchange health mailbox ensures the health of your Exchange organization's mailboxes. Your Exchange Server uses multiple Exchange health mailboxes to monitor its own health. Various tests and probes are conducted on these health mailboxes to check if there are any errors. These Exchange health mailboxes are checked for errors using PowerShell cmdlets. If any errors show up, each of the Exchange health mailboxes should be reset before the issue spreads to the user mailboxes. It is essential to keep an eye on the various Exchange health mailbox user accounts in your Exchange server.
Using PowerShell scripts to track your Exchange health mailboxes can be inefficient and time-consuming. This is where ManageEngine Exchange Reporter Plus comes in. The solution's monitoring feature is the perfect tool to keep an eye on your Exchange environment's health. The product monitors various aspects of the system and provides extensive reports.
What does ManageEngine Exchange Reporter Plus monitor in your Microsoft Exchange system?
Beyond monitoring Exchange health mailboxes, Exchange Reporter Plus also monitors the health of various aspects of your Exchange organization. The solution enables you to perform several functions in these health dashboards.
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Managed Availability, a feature introduced in Exchange 2013, is a built-in monitoring system that tracks the Exchange environment and mailboxes. It has self-recovery capabilities. The system performs tests and probes that stimulate end-user actions and detect any issues that the Exchange components might have. It uses special mailboxes called monitoring or health mailboxes to perform these tests. If any problems arise during the tests, then the service performs a diagnosis and solves the issues.
We know that Exchange's Managed Availability has health mailboxes that ensure all is well with the mailboxes and the system. The various tests used to ensure the health of the system are conducted by sending and receiving mails, checking for any mailbox property changes, etc. These activities are performed on the health mailboxes and if the Managed Availability service encounters any issues while conducting these tests, the service starts a recovery process and prevents these issues from affecting user mailboxes. To see all the health mailbox user accounts in your Exchange environment, use the below PowerShell command:
Get-Mailbox -Monitoring | ft name,database
Until the Cumulative Update (CU) 6 of Exchange 2013, there was one Exchange health mailbox per mailbox database copy and Client Access Server. But from Exchange 2013 CU6, there is one Exchange health mailbox for every mailbox database hosted on a mailbox server and 10 Exchange health mailboxes for every Client Access Role. The Microsoft Health Manager Service, which runs on each Exchange Server 2013 role, creates and manages these health mailboxes.
The various health mailboxes in an Exchange environment are managed by Exchange itself and not administrators. They are managed using the Health Manager Service that runs locally on the Exchange server. You need to check the health status of health mailboxes in situations where they might encounter some problems.
To list all the health mailboxes associated with a particular Exchange server:
Get-Mailbox -Monitoring | ?{$_.DisplayName -like "*-*"}
To list all the health mailboxes associated with a particular Exchange mailbox database:
Get-Mailbox -Monitoring | ?{$_.DisplayName -like "*-"}
To check the Exchange health mailboxes: Get-Mailbox -Monitoring.
You can reset any health mailbox if you notice that it is throwing an error in the output. Remember to clear and reset all the health mailboxes, even if only a few of them have problems. This ensures there are no potential issues with the other Exchange health mailboxes in your system. Here is how you can reset the health mailboxes in your Microsoft Exchange environment:
Restart the Exchange Server Health Manager service on all the Exchange servers in your environment.
Here are a few points to keep in mind while you manage the Exchange health mailboxes:
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