Details
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).
NOTE: Nessus has not performed this check. Please review the benchmark to ensure target compliance.
Solution
Open the Exchange Management Shell and enter the following command:
perfmon
In the left pane, navigate to Performance >> Data Collector Sets >> User Defined.
In left pane, right-click on User Defined >> New >> Data Collector Set and configure the system to use the data collection set for monitoring the queues.
Supportive Information
The following resource is also helpful.
This security hardening control applies to the following category of controls within NIST 800-53: Audit and Accountability.This control applies to the following type of system Windows.
References
- 800-53|AU-6(4)
- CAT|II
- CCI|CCI-000154
- Rule-ID|SV-221209r612603_rule
- STIG-ID|EX16-ED-000080
- STIG-Legacy|SV-95209
- STIG-Legacy|V-80499
- Vuln-ID|V-221209