{"id":5958,"date":"2015-06-30T10:31:50","date_gmt":"2015-06-30T15:31:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dcmblogmulti.wpengine.com\/?p=5958"},"modified":"2024-01-16T19:16:45","modified_gmt":"2024-01-16T19:16:45","slug":"monitor-exchange-outlook-web-access","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dotcom-monitor.com\/blog\/monitor-exchange-outlook-web-access\/","title":{"rendered":"Monitor Exchange Outlook Web Access"},"content":{"rendered":"

Is Outlook Web Access down right now?<\/p>\n

What is the Outlook service status?<\/p>\n

Is Exchange down?<\/p>\n

You\u2019ve come to the right place.\u00a0 We can help you determine the answers to these questions before your users have a chance to ask them.\u00a0 We will show you how to monitor Exchange Outlook Web Access.<\/p>\n

Dotcom-Monitor has all the tools you need to perform Web monitoring for Exchange Outlook Web Access, including OWA, ActiveSync, SMTP, POP3 and IMAP4.\u00a0 While the last three protocols mentioned are fairly common and straight-forward, the first two, Outlook Web Access and ActiveSync are a bit more unique to Dotcom-Monitor.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

This article focuses on monitoring Outlook Web Access (OWA) performance.\u00a0 There are two different\u00a0ways to monitor OWA.\u00a0 One is to simply load the portal at specified intervals, verifying that the portal is online and available. \u00a0The second, more thorough method is to actually log into the web portal using a legitimate username and password, and then to perform several actions in the account, verifying that not only is the portal online, but that it is properly communicating with the Exchange server.<\/p>\n

Monitor Exchange Outlook Web Access Server<\/h2>\n

Using the Dotcom Monitor ServerView Platform, you can quickly and easily setup the first type of monitor.\u00a0 Simply select httpss monitoring, enter the url of the site and set your monitoring parameters such as frequency of test and locations to test from.\u00a0 ServerView allows you to monitor both the basic availability of the OWA portal as well as the functionality of the related protocols such as ActiveSync, POP, IMAP and SMTP.\u00a0 You can use ServerView to automatically send and receive messages via these protocols just as easily as you can monitor the uptime of the portal.<\/p>\n

The second type of monitoring, a scripted path through the OWA site is a little more complex to set up, but much more thorough in terms of verifying that your Outlook Web Access portal is working properly.\u00a0 To perform the UserView monitoring of your website you can use the EveryStep scripting tool to record your interactions with the website by simply pointing, clicking and typing while on the site.\"monitor-exchange-outlook-web-access\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Setting Up OWA Monitoring<\/h2>\n

Now we will show you how to set up web monitoring on an outlook web access server for Microsoft exchange.<\/p>\n

A sample script might start with entering the url of your OWA portal.<\/p>\n

Once the portal has loaded, click on and type in the username and password fields, then press the login button.<\/p>\n

Once the inbox has loaded you may click on the \u201ccompose new mail\u201d button.\u00a0 From here you can enter a test message to yourself and hit send.\u00a0 You can even add in unique ID variables after you record the script so that you verify each specific email was sent successfully. Note that the Unique IDs need to be added after the script has been recorded, and may require some help from support to properly setup.<\/p>\n

Now you may wish to inject a 45 second delay into the script to allow your exchange server to process the message and send it back to you through the OWA interface.\u00a0 The time delay is up to you, depending upon how quickly your server tends to process email.<\/p>\n

Using the Rich Internet Application (RIA) tools, you can then perform a keyword validation on the inbox until you see that the email has arrived.\u00a0 When the email has been detected you can click to delete the email and then log out of OWA.<\/p>\n

Once the scripted walkthrough has been recorded, you stop recording and replay the script to verify that no errors were detected.\u00a0 After the script has been verified simply upload it to your Dotcom-Monitor account and begin monitoring your Outlook Web Access Server.<\/p>\n

Troubleshooting slow Outlook Web Access<\/h2>\n

Not only does this method of scripting access to OWA tell you if something is broken, but it records the amount of time it takes to access each portion of the site.\u00a0 Even if you inject delays to wait for the email to process, you can set thresholds to send you an alert if the entire process ever takes a longer time to complete than normal.<\/p>\n

In addition to the thresholds, any time an error is detected there are additional metrics recorded such as:<\/p>\n