How's My Health?

Every Admins role is to make the Environment up and running at all times and minimize the end user downtime and provide continuous availability of Services and rich user experience.

As humans even Servers are prone to get affected with disease (issues ) and as a Doctor (Admins) it is our role to check their Health periodically and provide them necessary medicines ( Updates/hot fixes) and ensure that they remain healthy at all times.

How do I know my Environment is healthy ? To answer this question Admins need to take up necessary measures to Analyze the environment and gather information regarding the server issues and performance and make a remediation plan and this is same for our Exchange Server and Lync Server Environment and typically the same for all other Server products.

Microsoft has provided the following tools to Analyze the current environment and gather details about the current health status and potential issues and provides a detailed report with which we can understand things better and start to work to make the Environment stable and achieve better performance.

Following are the Major Tools

Exchange Best Practices Analyzer

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/bb288481.aspx

Risk and Health Assessment Program for Exchange Server (ExRAP)

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=20857

Lync Server 2010 Best Practices Analyzer

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=4750

Lync Server 2013 Best Practices Analyzer

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=35455

Note:

Exchange Best Practices Analyzer is retired in Exchange 2013 and now the readiness checks are performed  to ensure the environment is ready for deployment , more information is available in the below Technet article

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj150508%28v=exchg.150%29.aspx