News
NetIQ Reports on Exchange
- By Scott Bekker
- 02/20/2001
NetIQ Corp. has
products to monitor Exchange server performance, but most companies use
Exchange servers to send e-mail, not push gear to the limit. AppAnalyzer, a new
product from NetIQ, shows how an Exchange Server is used.
Today, NetIQ announced the general availability of
AppAnalyzer 1.0, its new tool for reporting on Exchange use. The product is
designed to give administrators a sense of the whos, whats, wheres, and whys of
Exchange use.
NetIQ’s AppManager is able to monitor the performance of
an Exchange server - it can tell administrators about the size of an email
server’s load. AppAnalzyer offers the inverse, providing data about the
contents of that load.
“Companies really
didn’t have a way for administrators to understand the activities on Exchange,”
says Chris Williams, director of messaging servers at NetIQ. Williams believes
that AppAnalyzer fills an important hole by allowing administrators to get a
sense of who is using the mail server and for what purpose.
Williams says that some administrators spend two to three
days simply gathering information by hand to create departmental billing
reports for e-mail. One feature enables administrators to set up criteria and
create billing reports automatically. The software can track 11 different
activities for billing purposes.
Policy enforcement is another area in which Williams
believes AppAnalyzer will be helpful. For example, if a company has a policy
against non-business attachments, the software can point out problem spots.
Using the software, administrators can detect if Easter executables are sent in
large numbers, clogging the mail server. The software can also pinpoint the
offenders, leading to administrative action.
At installation, AppAnalyzer autodiscovers an enterprise’s
Exchange servers, configuring them to extract data. AppManager users can also
use its agents to collect data, a setup Williams says is ideal for highly
distributed organizations.
AppAnalyzer uses a SQL database to store and retrieve
information and uses OLAP for generating reports. Williams says OLAP is faster
than using third party reporting engines and is more portable across platforms.
Once a report is generated users can drill down into data, add fields to
monitor, and recut information on the fly.
After he left Microsoft’s Exchange marketing group,
Williams founded Sirana Software to develop software for reporting on
Exchange. Sirana worked on developing AppAnalyzer until it was purchased by
NetIQ last year. AppAnalyzer is the first product to result from these
development efforts.
Williams says many customers demanded tools for managing
servers when he worked at Microsoft. He believes that AppAnalyzer will fill a
major hole in the Windows management arena.
In
future releases, NetIQ plans to integrate AppAnalyzer with some of its other
products, including AppManager. WebTrends offers similar functionality to
AppAnalyzer for managing websites, but Williams says there is room for
AppAnalyzer to grow. “There will be some for non-messaging application
support,” he says. – Christopher McConnell
About the Author
Scott Bekker is editor in chief of Redmond Channel Partner magazine.