I just attended a Live Meeting hosted by Microsoft’s Nicole Allen and Mike Lee. Nicole is well known in the Exchange community as being an expert on Exchange performance analysis, and her presentation covered some of the guts of the Exchange Performance Troubleshooting Analyzer (ExPTA). If you haven’t used ExPTA, you’re missing out; it’s a terrific tool for analyzing the performance of your Exchange server and identifying problems, including problems experienced (or caused) by individual users. Mike Lee also did a similar presentation on the Exchange Disaster Recovery Analyzer (ExDRA). (For a good tutorial on what ExDRA does, see Marc Grote’s article here.)
The interesting thing to me is the degree of investment that Microsoft is putting into these free add-on tools for Exchange. They fill a void that no third party vendor has effectively exploited, and customers love them because they greatly simplify the process of finding current or latent problems with an Exchange configuration. Between ExBPA, ExDRA, and ExPTA, Microsoft is assembling quite a formidable set of analysis and troubleshooting tools.
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