Its better if we receive alerts regarding Exchange service level unavailability during any outage.

Though the managed availability  self healing component is very much capable of self monitoring the Exchange services still few companies would request a display dashboard about the current Exchange services and to be notified via sms and email when there is any outage.

Below are the main prerequisites:

1) System Center Operations Manager 2012 R2 is in environment.
2) Exchange Server 2013 Management Pack is installed. Currently only Exchange 2013 management pack is present and it supports 2016.

Below are the high level steps that we need to perform in the SCOM 2012:

1) Create Channels – Basically a path through which the alert will be delivered to the destination (admins).
2) Create Subscribers – Persons who are supposed to be notified when an alert is identified in SCOM for Exchange.
3) Create Subscriptions – Selecting the components to be alerted when any Exchange services are unavailable.

This should be the case for any applications to be notified when there is an issue with their system.
To receive SCOM alerts in mobile as SMS we need to have an SMS routing agent configured.

Below work flow is the normal way of configuring to receive alerts in SMS :

SCOM – Mailbox Server Relay – Reaches Mail Contact local SMTP address domain.com – Finds the SMTP target address – Finds the appropriate send connector – Routes to the SMS routing Agent – Exchange Admin receives the SMS

To receive SCOM alerts in a Email:

Below work flow is the normal way of configuring to receive alerts in Email:

SCOM subscribers – Mailbox server relay – Finds Mail Group – Alerts Delivered to the Admin’s mailbox.

So we need to give relay permission to the SCOM 2012 server on the Exchange to send the alerts when any issue occurs.

First we need to create Channel :

To create a channel perform the below :

Navigate to Operations manager console – Click on Administration – Click on notifications- Select Channels

Right click on Channels – New Channel – Select the appropriate channel that we wish to route .

The best way always is to create only SMTP channels route them to exchange and from there deliver it to the appropriate destinations.
This will keep less complication.

Also we can create a DNS A record and point them to all mailbox servers to that record as well.

To create a Subscribers perform the below:

Navigate to Operations manager console – Click on Administration – Click on notifications- Select Channels

Right Click on Subscriptions – new Subscriber

Create a new Subscriber

Select always send notifications

Add the delivery address – admin email address if it needs to be delivered to email or email contact if it needs to be routed to his mobile device

Select the channel type as Email(SMTP) – Its better if we route all the messages via Exchange and from there we can route to the appropriate destinations. I feel this will make less complication in creating the channels.

Now we need to create the Subscriptions

To create a Subscriptions perform the below:

Navigate to Operations manager console – Click on Administration – Click on notifications- Select Channels
Right Click on Subscriptions – new Subscriptions

 

Now this part is very important. We further need to fine tune this based on the setup, issues. Here we are actually specifying and subscribing  the alerts which we will be notified on a application unavailability .

So you need to choose the alerts based on your request. For Exchange i can say if there is any issues with  Database copies unhealthy , Database dismounted we can specify them with specific name , description in this criteria section and get notified via SMS.

For the  exchange services EWS, Active Sync, MAPI we don’t need to configure here since we have the health probes configured on the load balancers and will be notified from them.

 

And in this part we specify the subscribers:

Usually the subscribers are the group of distribution that we created.

Now select the Channels  that was configured to route the alerts to Exchange servers.

After this is done we would be able to receive the Exchange 2016 alerts through email and SMS.

Thanks & Regards
Sathish Veerapandian
MVP – Office Server and Services