Hi Folks,
I just had an incident on an mail setup where the SMTP, POP3 and all other services seemed to be up, but mail was being delivered correctly. It took around 30 minutes for users to start logging calls on our service desk, and I am sure I could have been alerted via Zabbix sooner somehow.
I realize that I could possibly monitor specific performance counters from within Windows for some servers, but that doesn't help as the servers are cross site, and I know other people have set ups with multiple parts to it, i.e. a UNIX SMTP content scanner server & Exchange server.
The solution I thought of would be for Zabbix to send an email via SMTP to a specific account, Zabbix would also check mail via POP3 or IMAP etc. The mail would have a specific random header like 2007111600001. So Zabbix would know the time it sent that specific mail, and the time it took for it to get to the mail box.
The POP3 account could be checked every 10 seconds, so you would know to the closest 10 seconds how long it takes for mail to go though your whole system. Triggers could then be set, for example if the mail took more than 2 minutes for delivery to take place.
This sort of setup would work for all sorts of mail set ups.
Anyway, this was just an idea from a real-life scenario that actually happened.
M.
I just had an incident on an mail setup where the SMTP, POP3 and all other services seemed to be up, but mail was being delivered correctly. It took around 30 minutes for users to start logging calls on our service desk, and I am sure I could have been alerted via Zabbix sooner somehow.
I realize that I could possibly monitor specific performance counters from within Windows for some servers, but that doesn't help as the servers are cross site, and I know other people have set ups with multiple parts to it, i.e. a UNIX SMTP content scanner server & Exchange server.
The solution I thought of would be for Zabbix to send an email via SMTP to a specific account, Zabbix would also check mail via POP3 or IMAP etc. The mail would have a specific random header like 2007111600001. So Zabbix would know the time it sent that specific mail, and the time it took for it to get to the mail box.
The POP3 account could be checked every 10 seconds, so you would know to the closest 10 seconds how long it takes for mail to go though your whole system. Triggers could then be set, for example if the mail took more than 2 minutes for delivery to take place.
This sort of setup would work for all sorts of mail set ups.
Anyway, this was just an idea from a real-life scenario that actually happened.
M.
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