V-259584

Discussion

Monitors are automated "process watchers" that respond to performance changes and can be useful in detecting outages and alerting administrators where attention is needed. Exchange has built-in monitors that enable the administrator to generate alerts if thresholds are reached, better enabling them to react in a timely fashion. This field offers choices of alerts when a "warning" or "critical" threshold is reached on the SMTP queue. A good rule of thumb (default) is to issue warnings when SMTP queue growth exceeds 10 minutes and critical messages when it exceeds 20 minutes, which should only exist occasionally. Frequent alerts against this counter may indicate a network or other issue (such as inbound spammer traffic) that directly impacts email delivery. Notification choices include email alert to an email-enabled account (e.g., an email administrator) or invoke a script to take other action (e.g., to add an event to the Microsoft Application Event Log, where external monitors might detect it).

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Note: By default, there are two user-defined data collector sets created by Exchange: ExchangeDiagnosticsDailyPerformanceLog and ExchangeDiagnosticsPerformanceLog. These are not providing enough data to monitor SMTP queues per the requirement. Additionally, if a third-party application is performing monitoring functions, the reviewer should verify the application is monitoring correctly and mark the vulnerability Not Applicable.

Open the Exchange Management Shell and enter the following command:

perfmon

In the left pane, navigate to Performance >> Data Collector Sets >> User Defined.

If no sets are defined or queues are not being monitored, this is a finding.