Inside the Exchange Server Profile Analyzer

The Exchange Server Profile Analyzer is a tool that allows Exchange administrators to get a real-time look at a plethora of statistics surrounding your Exchange servers. The statistics generated by the Profile Analyzer tell the complete story behind the way that your Exchange server is used (or abused!) by your users.

The Exchange Profile Analyzer is available for download from Microsoft and is a breeze to install. I installed the utility with no problems to my production Exchange 2007 Enterprise server running Windows Server 2003 R2 SP2.

In order to run the tool, you do need to create a utility account in Active Directory or have an available account that is not a member of the Domain Admins group. I created a utility account called EPA.

This account must be made a member of the Exchange View-Only Administrators group as well. To do this, from the Exchange Management Console, click Organization Configuration and, from the Actions pane, choose Add Exchange Administrator. Add the account you just created to the Exchange View-Only Administrators role.

Next, start the tool by going to Start > All Programs > Microsoft Exchange > Exchange Server Profile Analyzer. Choose the Connect to Active Directory option, specify the domain controller that should be used by the tool and then provide the credentials for the new utility account.

Choose the Domain Controller and account to use for the analysis process.

Now, choose the Configuration option and decide which stores you want to include in your analysis. From this screen, also choose the date range that should be analysed. When you are ready, click the Start Collect link at the bottom of the screen. Note that the information collected is an estimate and may not always be exact.

Choose configuration options.

After you run the report, there are a number of statistics made available for you. For a look at individual report pages, see the Exchange Server Profile Analyzer gallery.