Performance Counters that show if Exchange DAG Cluster is Off-line

Which Performance counters can I use to alert me when my Exchange 2010 DAG Cluster goes off-line in MS Failover Cluster Manager?
ei00004Network AdministratorAsked:
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SteveConnect With a Mentor Commented:
Surely there is a way to do this by using the Performance counters that are already installed with Exchange.
not really because DAG health isn't a 'performance' thing, it's more of a status.

There may be a dirty way of doing it using performance, but it's not going to be very accurate.

see the link below for example. This shows various performance counters for Exchange.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff367871(v=exchg.141).aspx

There are counters there about the number of logs waiting to be replicated between DBs, latency in transfer etc.
These could be used to 'assume' there is a problem as the replication would effectively halt and queues would form.

it would cause false positives, and may not provide a very quick alert that the DAG had an issue, so I do not feel this would be suitable for monitoring purposes.

Powershell scripts running on the DAG health directly would be much more accurate and quicker.
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Radhakrishnan RConnect With a Mentor Senior Technical LeadCommented:
Hi,

I don't think you will be able to set performance counter for this. This can be achieved by powershell script, have a look http://www.msexchange.org/articles-tutorials/exchange-server-2010/monitoring-operations/monitor-dag-database-failover.html

Hope this helps.
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ei00004Network AdministratorAuthor Commented:
Looks like you actually would have to run these scripts each time you want to check the DAG status. I would like to have something to alert me automatically when the DAG shows offline in the MS Failover Cluster manager. There are several Exchange performance counters that are available, I just don't know which (if any) of them will alert me when the DAG is offline.
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chriskelkConnect With a Mentor Commented:
You could run a Powershell script (via a scheduled task) on a server to ping the DAG IP address, and then if it's unavailable, send an email notification.  Best to run the script on a server outside of the Exchange DAG, and send the email notification via an outside SMTP server and to an external email address, so that the mail will get through with the DAG down.
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ei00004Network AdministratorAuthor Commented:
Chriskelk - Yes I probably could run a Powershell script (via a scheduled task) on a server to ping the DAG IP address. This would need to pinging the server several times a minute to be accurate and possibly creating unnecessary network traffic. Surely there is a way to do this by using the Performance counters that are already installed with Exchange.
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