How to fix the Health Rollup Problem in Distributed Applications with Exchange 2013 Health Sets

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While working with a customer  we tried to create a distributed application for their Exchange 2013 environment. Plan was to create distributed apps for Customer Touch Points and for Key dependencies then configure Service Level Tracking. But no matter what we do distributed application did not rollup the health of the exchange health set.

To demonstrate lets create a basic DA  for Exchange 2013 . I will add some health set instances in two components.

You can get he health set from Logical entity/Application Component/Windows Application Component/Health Set

 

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This is how my distributed app  looks  like in designer…

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After creating the distributed app  when you check the diagram   you will see that health will not rollup  from health set to DA components.

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If you open the Health Explorer on KeyDependencies  you will see everything is in unmonitored state

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And ”Component Group Health Roll-up”   properties….

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This is the Dependency Rollup Monitor for the Availability. . Everything looks  normal except that unnamed monitor icon sitting outside the aggregate rollup monitors.

So lets switch to  Authoring pane and open monitors for the Health Set Class

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We can see that  event monitor for Exchange 2013  is  targeting the  entity health directly not the Availability rollup selected for dependency monitor. This is why  we are not seeing any health rollup in DA.

 

To fix it I have copied the  event monitor  from the exchange MP to an unsealed MP  and targeted it to Availability  Rollup.

After importing this MP  I can see new monitor under availability

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DA starts to rollup the health properly …..

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Now we have duplicate monitors doing the same job. Since its an event monitor  from resource wise it wont have  much impact on agent performance.

From this point on ;

  • You can leave both monitors enabled. This will cause duplicate alerts to be generated. You can disable alerting for our monitor  and keep it only for DA health Rollup.
  • You can disable the monitor in the original MP and use only the copied one.  This might have undesirable results if Microsoft releases a new version of the MP and changes the configuration for the monitor. 

In my opinion  its better to keep the original one for alerting and copy one for DA rollup only.

If you intend to use only copied one you also need to copy the dependency rollup monitor definitions. These are not included in the attached MP!

ExcHealthSetMonitorFix.zip

P.S. This posts in this blog are provided AS IS  with no warranties….

Comments

  • Anonymous
    February 24, 2015
    With Exchange 2013 Exchange Product Group has chosen a different route and implemented all the monitoring
  • Anonymous
    February 18, 2016
    This blog has just saved me.