Mailbox I/O usage monitoring on Exchange 2013 - possible?

randal · 12 Feb 2015 at 10:20

At about 9.45-10am every day I'm seeing disk and network I/O spikes on our Exchange 2013 server, severe enough to render the host inaccessible (clients report "trying to connect" messages).

I can see the mail store getting hammered by Exchange Store Worker process when this happens, but I was wondering if there was any way to report in a more granular fashion?

I'd like to understand if it's one mailbox getting hammered (or one user doing the hammering), or if it's a system wide process.

Cheers

Armageus · 12 Feb 2015 at 10:27

Could it be any of the maintenance tasks (e.g. online defrag, deleted item retention cleanup etc) - I believe they default to between 02:00-06:00, but any possibility the window could have been changed or extended?

randal · 12 Feb 2015 at 10:45

Possibly, I'll have a look at the config but I'm convinced it's network access of resources on the server that's initiating the hammering. Seems too coincidental that there's 35mb/sec network spikes at the same time as the disk I/O going through the roof...

Armageus · 12 Feb 2015 at 10:57

randal said:
Possibly, I'll have a look at the config but I'm convinced it's network access of resources on the server that's initiating the hammering. Seems too coincidental that there's 35mb/sec network spikes at the same time as the disk I/O going through the roof...

Could be something as obvious as a shift starting at 10:00am and everyone logs on to their email at that point, or a daily process e.g. sending bulk emails e.g. invoices or statements out.

Could be a specific client logs on at that time, and Outlook isn't using any local cache, so pulls the whole mailbox down?

Haven't personally used Exchange/Outlook for a couple of years, so apologies if my terminology is a bit rusty