Email is one of the most heavily used communications method which makes your Exchange servers critical to your business.

The health and performance of your Exchange servers should be a top priority, and this means that you must monitor the server performance as part of your routine so that problems can be discovered early and resolved before they begin to make a serious impact.

Here are 5 performance counters to monitor on your Exchange servers today.

1. % Processor Time

This counter shows the amount of time that the CPU is processing a task.  This counter should typically be below 75%, although it may run higher during heavy workloads such as backups.  If the processor time is consistently high you will want to look into which processes are utilizing the CPU the most.

2. Processor Queue Length

When instructions are sent to the CPU they go into a queue to be scheduled for execution.  This counter shows the length of that queue, and should ideally be no higher than 5 for each processor in the server.

When this counter is above the ideal threshold along with a high % Processor Time it indicates that the server workload is too high for the CPU resources available.

3. Memory Available MBytes

This counter shows the amount of memory that is not in use and is available for new tasks or processes, and should be at least 100Mb at all times. Continue reading 5 Performance Counters to Monitor on Your Exchange Servers