How to Gain Total Message
System Visibility with
Quest MessageStats and Quest
Spotlight on Messaging
by
Quest Software, Inc.
BUSINESS BRIEF
© 2009 Quest Software, Inc.
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December 2009
Business Brief: How to Gain Total Message System Visibility with Quest MessageStats and Quest Spotlight on Messaging
1
Contents
Introduction ..................................................................................................................................................................... 3
Quest MessageStats: Know What’s Happening in Your Messaging Environment .......................................................... 4
Understand Usage and Plan with Confidence ............................................................................................................. 4
Find Unused and Excess Capacity .............................................................................................................................. 4
Achieve and Maintain Compliance .............................................................................................................................. 4
Optimize Operational Efficiencies ................................................................................................................................ 5
Case Study: SHI Gets ―Priceless‖ Information from MessageStats ............................................................................. 5
Spotlight on Messaging – Identify, Diagnose and Resolve Problems ............................................................................. 6
Proactively Identify Issues and Performance Bottlenecks ........................................................................................... 6
Accelerate Problem Resolution ................................................................................................................................... 6
Improve System Performance ..................................................................................................................................... 6
MessageStats and Spotlight on Messaging – Better Together ....................................................................................... 7
Case Study: Con-Way Cruises Toward Greater Efficiency with Automation Capabilities ............................................ 7
Quest – Your Experienced Messaging Partner .............................................................................................................. 9
Conclusion .................................................................................................................................................................... 10
About Quest .................................................................................................................................................................. 11
Contacting Quest Software ........................................................................................................................................ 11
Contacting Quest Support ......................................................................................................................................... 11
Business Brief: How to Gain Total Message System Visibility with Quest MessageStats and Quest Spotlight on Messaging
2
Introduction
Your workforce depends on an available and secure messaging system to remain productive. Employees
who are mobile or geographically dispersed need flexible communications solutions to stay connected.
Any messaging delay -- created by telephone tag, voice messages, unexpected systems interruptions or
lack of information on who is available -- can threaten productivity and your bottom line.
Securing a multi-platform messaging system can be challenging. Because many Unified Communications
(UC) technologies, such as VoIP and instant messaging, are common in the corporate environment, many
administrators are discovering security and performance risks that they may not have faced in the past and
are ill-equipped to handle now.
For this reason, it is important for every organization to continually evaluate the security and performance
of their messaging systems. An attack or a service disruption can disable your organization’s internal and
external communications as well as immobilize your business processes. Worse yet, an intruder could
breach your system to steal or modify data, and eavesdrop on voice or video calls.
Unfortunately, most monitoring and analysis tools that are designed for traditional data networks cannot
detect UC-based attacks or performance problems.
This business brief will explore two solutions for monitoring and analyzing your multi-platform messaging
system that provide these capabilities -- Quest MessageStats and Quest Spotlight on Messaging.
Business Brief: How to Gain Total Message System Visibility with Quest MessageStats and Quest Spotlight on Messaging
3
Quest MessageStats: Know What’s Happening
in Your Messaging Environment
You need visibility into your messaging system and how it’s used to achieve compliance and ensure
uninterrupted availability. But native tools don’t always provide you with the information you need to
proactively manage your environment.
Quest MessageStats™ provides a complete messaging system reporting and analysis solution. Used on
more than 15 million Exchange mailboxes around the world, MessageStats gathers data about Exchange
and other messaging components, then analyzes and reports on it to:
Provide a better understanding usage and trends
Find unused and excess capacity
Achieve and maintain compliance
Optimize operational efficiencies
Quest MessageStats uses a single interface to provide critical intelligence about Microsoft Exchange,
Office Communications Server (OCS), Outlook Web Access and Windows Mobile, as well as BlackBerry,
Sendmail/Postfix and Quest Archive Manager. MessageStats’ insight has helped thousands of
organizations maintain performance, define SLAs, accelerate migrations, simplify audits and predict
storage requirements.
MessageStats automates data collection from all components of the messaging infrastructure in both
simple and distributed environments, then filters the data for analysis and reporting. It provides summaries
and detailed information on messaging usage and trends, including storage capacity, mailbox content and
size, delivery times, distribution lists and public folders. This insight will help you quickly respond to audits
or legal requests, as well as prepare you for future migrations.
Understand Usage and Plan with Confidence
MessageStats allows you to assess the messaging system’s capacity to handle short- and long-term
growth rates. It also give you clear visibility at organizational and departmental levels and it can monitor
and track e-mail quotas, message sizes, configuration/usage of mailboxes, public folders, distribution lists
and contacts.
Enterprise reporting dashboards make information quickly accessible. You can customize reports with
more than 400 graphs and tables representing every aspect of your messaging infrastructure.
Find Unused and Excess Capacity
MessageStats details the volume of traffic flowing through the environment and the storage space
consumed by messages. You can use this insight to create and maintain budgets, forecast growth, and
make informed decisions concerning operational requirements, migration plans, capacity needs and
archiving opportunities. You can also find and eliminate unused accounts, mailboxes and servers, and
underused stores, devices and storage.
Reports illustrate the impact of real-time communications on corporate objectives. Multiple reporting
perspectives provide platform-specific data at the organizational, departmental, business unit, and regional
levels.
Achieve and Maintain Compliance
MessageStats helps your organization comply with internal and external regulations. Details regarding
messages sent or received by a suspect individual -- containing a specific key word in a subject line, or
exchanged with a questionable Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) domain -- can be quickly and easily
accessed.
Business Brief: How to Gain Total Message System Visibility with Quest MessageStats and Quest Spotlight on Messaging
4
You can customize your auditing activities by key word, delivery time, message-level history of all SMTP
domain traffic, and message header information. The message ID is also included, facilitating further
investigation with native tools.
Custom html reports are simple to create and adjust on the fly using the Custom Report Wizard. You can
subscribe to particular reports; they will be generated on a regular schedule and delivered via e-mail,
through FTP, or to a web site in your preferred format.
Optimize Operational Efficiencies
MessageStats provides the metrics required to understand and adjust messaging operations, helping you
align with industry best practices and improve system reliability, performance and availability to meet
SLAs. MessageStats’ inventory reporting also decreases the risks and costs associated with migrations.
Top-level metrics confirm service delivery success while summarizing messaging system traffic and
capacity. This information helps you create financial models for your environment.
Case Study: SHI Gets ―Priceless‖ Information from MessageStats
SHI is a global provider of information technology products and services. For more extensive and easier
visibility into its messaging environment, SHI turned to Quest Software.
At SHI, gaining visibility into the messaging environment was a time-consuming, manual effort. ―We
support about 1,600 mailboxes, and Microsoft Active Directory and Exchange has little or no reporting
features,‖ explained Zulfikar Fanuswala, systems engineer for messaging and collaboration at SHI. ―For
example, to simply find the number of mailboxes on an Exchange server, we had to create a script in
PowerShell. The script put all the mailbox information in a text file, which went into an Excel sheet. We
then had to slice and dice the information using Excel.‖
Discovering the devices employees were using to connect to the network was also cumbersome. ―We had
to search through the IIS logs of two of our front-end servers for a string and export that into another text
file,‖ explained Fanuswala. ―Then we had to look through that text file to gather the device information and
find out how many people were synching. The process took half an hour to complete.‖
Also, SHI wanted to clean up idle and empty distribution lists in Active Directory. The company needed a
robust solution to maintain and report on its messaging environment.
MessageStats has provided SHI with unparalleled visibility into its messaging environment. Many reporting
requests that used to require custom scripts and half an hour or more of tedious effort can now be fulfilled
immediately. ―Instead of writing a script to find the number of mailboxes on one Exchange cluster, we can
get that information with a single click using MessageStats,‖ said Fanuswala.
Also, the IT staff is now able to fulfill requests that were previously too labor-intensive to consider, enabling
other SHI staff to be more productive. ―For example, our marketing staff wanted a list of vendors that we
regularly e-mail so we could send them information about our services,‖ explained Fanuswala. ―That list
would be next to impossible to pull together using Exchange. But with MessageStats, we were able to
easily produce a list of e-mail addresses filtered by domain.‖
MessageStats also helps SHI reduce capital expenses on hardware and storage by providing clear reports
on the number of users on each server, broken down by storage group. ―MessageStats helps us keep the
load between our two cluster environments equal, so we use our existing servers effectively,‖ said
Fanuswala. ―It gives us a quick view of how much storage we have and how much we’re using, so we can
manage it better. We can archive as needed, ensuring we’ll never lack primary storage in an emergency.
By giving us these reports, MessageStats will help us save money on storage and server purchases.‖
MessageStats has also reduced Blackberry costs for SHI. ―Our BlackBerry administrator loves the
BlackBerry reporting in MessageStats, especially the call reporting,‖ said Goldwater. ―He adjusts users’
plans to make sure they’re covered properly and the company is not getting hit with unnecessary charges.‖
With MessageStats, SHI now has a good understanding of its messaging environment so it can respond to
detailed requests and plan effectively. ―MessageStats has been an excellent addition to our to our
Exchange environment,‖ said Fanuswala. ―We now have a good overview of our messaging system,
including how much e-mail we’re sending out and receiving. This information is priceless.‖
Business Brief: How to Gain Total Message System Visibility with Quest MessageStats and Quest Spotlight on Messaging
5
Spotlight on Messaging – Identify, Diagnose
and Resolve Problems
The growth of e-mail, IM, mobile, VoIP, and conferencing has increased the complexity of the messaging
environment. This raises the bar when it comes to system performance and availability: problems can
quickly spiral out of control, impacting users across an organization. Performance bottlenecks can slow
message delivery and increases in traffic can complicate problem resolution. Problems become chronic
when left unattended. Now more than ever, administrators need a solution to diagnose and resolve system
issues across multiple platforms. Quest Spotlight on Messaging is the answer.
Spotlight® on Messaging provides real-time diagnostics and problem resolution for Microsoft Exchange
Server, BlackBerry Enterprise Server, and Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS). It allows you
to:
Identify issues and performance bottlenecks before they affect end users
Locate the root cause of messaging system problems and resolve them from a single interface
Maximize the availability and responsiveness of messaging servers
Proactively Identify Issues and Performance Bottlenecks
Spotlight helps save money. Its powerful diagnostic tools help you reduce hardware costs by identifying
configurable performance bottlenecks. Spotlight also helps eliminate e-mail downtime to avoid costs
associated with lost productivity. And since Spotlight provides an easy-to-use, robust interface, your
organization can streamline management processes and reduce training expenses.
Spotlight’s unique management console provides a high-level view of the entire messaging organization at
a glance. It displays the status of core operations on all Exchange, BlackBerry, and Office
Communications Server 2007 servers, and provides familiar, multi-color alerts when thresholds are
exceeded. You can also use the console to monitor specific areas of concern after fixes are implemented
to verify the effects of changes.
Accelerate Problem Resolution
Spotlight enables faster problem resolution: as soon as a problem arises, you know why it occurred and
how to resolve it. Centralized diagnostics provide simple, quick identification of problems that would
normally require the use of multiple native tools.
Spotlight’s single console simplifies troubleshooting and diagnosis. Platform-specific diagnostics depict the
flow of data through the Exchange, BlackBerry, and Office Communications Server 2007 servers using
flow charts, graphs, and icons. Bottlenecks are highlighted in yellow and red, helping to locate issues
quickly, allowing you to drill down for accurate problem resolution.
The Expert Help feature assists administrators in troubleshooting every aspect of Exchange, mobile, and
Office Communications Server 2007 environments. This valuable resource helps you identify the true
source of problems and quickly resolve them.
Improve System Performance
Spotlight maximizes the availability and responsiveness of your messaging servers. Expert guidance
enables you to make a quick diagnosis and all monitoring information is displayed through a single
console.
Simple yet powerful tests ensure that the key parts of all messaging platforms are running properly,
including message delivery, Outlook Web Access (OWA) availability, mailbox logons, and information store
responsiveness. Tests can be scheduled as needed, and Spotlight will provide real-time alerts when
problems arise.
Business Brief: How to Gain Total Message System Visibility with Quest MessageStats and Quest Spotlight on Messaging
6
MessageStats and Spotlight on Messaging –
Better Together
When deployed together, MessageStats and Spotlight and Messaging provide you with total visibility into
your messaging system. You will better understand your environment’s usage and performance, enabling
you to simplify management as well as maintain security and compliance and ensure uninterrupted
performance. This ensures your organization’s business continuity and productivity, as well as saves
scarce resources and budget dollars.
Case Study: Con-Way Cruises Toward Greater Efficiency with Automation Capabilities
Con-way is a large global transportation and logistics company. Managing this complex business requires
an extensive IT infrastructure, including a messaging environment based on Microsoft® Exchange Server.
Con-way manages more than 10,000 mailboxes and 90,000 public folders in 500 locations in 17 countries
on five continents.
To enhance messaging capabilities, Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 was deployed to
provide employees with a larger selection of technologies for communicating and collaborating. These
include advanced Web conferencing capabilities, enterprise-grade instant messaging, and Microsoft Office
Communicator 2007—a Unified Communications client that Con-way employees use for collaborating
across locations and time zones via a range of communications options. The company also deployed
Microsoft Office Communicator Mobile, which extends Office Communicator 2007 capabilities to Windows
Mobile® devices; Enterprise Messenger, the client used by BlackBerry handhelds for connecting to a
Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 environment; and Microsoft Office Communicator Web
Access 2007, which allows users to connect from inside and outside the corporate network with just a Web
browser.
Con-way IT administrators wanted to know how many mobile devices were in use so the company could
plan for projected mobile growth. Additionally, administrators wanted to evaluate the number and size of
files transferred via Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 and Office Communications Server 2007 to
understand the impact that the movement of files might have on the company’s bandwidth.
They also needed to easily produce reports on the use of Exchange Server 2007 to ensure that all
mailboxes were properly administered and to plan for additional or modified server hardware to handle
messaging loads.
Con-way chose MessageStats and Spotlight on Messaging to help them monitor and report on the use of
Office Communications Server 2007 and Exchange Server 2007.
MessageStats enables Con-way IT administrators to monitor usage of the company’s communications
technologies. IT staff members also use MessageStats to monitor growing technologies, such as mobile
devices and instant messaging, in order to plan for future hardware and related infrastructure needs.
MessageStats makes it easy to produce reports that reveal patterns in the use of the company’s
communications infrastructure. ―With the administrative reports that we generate from MessageStats, we
can be more efficient with our time by producing desired results in far less time than it took to compile the
data manually,‖ says Scott Bueffel, Lead Systems Administrator for Con-way. ―The reports are doing things
for us that we had to do manually before, such as drilling down to details like usage and growth of a
specific public folder over time.‖
The simplified administration provided by MessageStats also helps with daily administrative tasks, such as
finding and closing inactive mailboxes and identifying issues that might affect performance. ―With the
deployment of Office Communications
Server 2007, we’ve been watching a number of different areas of performance,‖ says Bueffel.
―MessageStats helps us evaluate different types of Office Communications Server 2007 usage to ensure
that we have adequate hardware and bandwidth resources. It also helps us to monitor usage and move
resources accordingly.‖
Business Brief: How to Gain Total Message System Visibility with Quest MessageStats and Quest Spotlight on Messaging
7
Spotlight on Messaging enables Con-way resolve issues in the communications infrastructure before the
problems become a performance drain for users. Bueffel notes that prior to using Spotlight on Messaging,
the IT department had little visibility into problems that were affecting users. ―We don’t want to find out that
something is down by waiting for users to call us,‖ he says. ―With Spotlight on Messaging, we’re able to
monitor individual queue length, diagnostic testing, mailbox logon, store responsiveness, and other things
specific to Exchange Server 2007. We can react to performance issues before they have an impact on
business.‖
Business Brief: How to Gain Total Message System Visibility with Quest MessageStats and Quest Spotlight on Messaging
8
Quest – Your Experienced
Messaging Partner
You can count on Quest Software to help you dramatically simplify administration of your messaging
system. We are the messaging experts with more than 18 million mailboxes migrated, 30 million
mailboxes managed and two million mailboxes archived.
Quest has twice been named Microsoft’s Global ISV Partner of the Year and supports more messaging
platforms than any other vendor, including Exchange Server, BlackBerry Enterprise Server, Office
Communications Server 2007 and Windows Mobile/ Active Sync.
With 65 offices in 28 countries, as well as eight global support offices and 365x24x7 call centers, Quest
offers customers worldwide support and world-class experience.
Business Brief: How to Gain Total Message System Visibility with Quest MessageStats and Quest Spotlight on Messaging
9
Conclusion
Today’s multi-platform unified messaging systems have advanced from standalone e-mail, voice and realtime communications. However, it is critical for organizations to have solutions to help them monitor and
manage their environment to keep it secure and performing at the highest possible level.
Used together, Quest MessageStats and Quest Spotlight on Messaging provide total visibility into your
messaging system by analyzing, diagnosing, resolving and reporting on system usage and issues.
MessageStats helps administrators align usage with service levels for migration and capacity planning,
policy compliance and developing strategic business goals. And because real-time communications
depend upon the health and availability of the network, Spotlight on Messaging enables administrators to
diagnose and resolve problems in the environment in real time, before end users are impacted.
Business Brief: How to Gain Total Message System Visibility with Quest MessageStats and Quest Spotlight on Messaging
10
BUSINESS BRIEF
About Quest Software, Inc.
Now more than ever, organizations need to work smart and improve efficiency. Quest Software
creates and supports smart systems management products—helping our customers solve
everyday IT challenges faster and easier. Visit www.quest.com for more information.
Contacting Quest Software
PHONE
800.306.9329 (United States and Canada)
If you are located outside North America, you can find your
local office information on our Web site.
E-MAIL
[email protected]
MAIL
Quest Software, Inc.
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Aliso Viejo, CA 92656
USA
WEB SITE www.quest.com
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Visit SupportLink at https://support.quest.com.
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View the Global Support Guide for a detailed explanation of support programs, online services,
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5 Polaris Way, Aliso Viejo, CA 92656 | PHONE 800.306.9329 | WEB www.quest.com | E-MAIL [email protected]
If you are located outside North America, you can find local office information on our Web site.
© 2009 Quest Software, Inc.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Quest Software, MessageStats, and Spotlight on Messaging are registered trademarks of Quest Software, Inc. in the U.S.A. and/or other countries. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are property of their
respective owners.
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