Summarizing Message Tracking Logs

Twan van Beers
30 May, 2014

Exchange does a great job at logging all kinds of information, some by default and some can be switched on or extended. One example of this is the Exchange Message Tracking Logs. These logs can get large and analysing the data can be a bit of a chore. Some of the questions we are often asked are:

How much mail is going through this Exchange server?
What is the average mail size?
What is the percentage of daily mail sent each hour?
What is the largest message sent today?
Why was there are message queue between 3 and 4pm today?

All of this information is in the Message Tracking Logs, but getting the information out is sometimes a little trickier. Luckily PowerShell has some great Exchange cmdlets to help us out.

The attached script takes two parameters, the name of the server and the date to do the analysis for. It creates a csv file in your My Documents folder called MessageStats-ServerName-Date.csv.

Within this file the following columns are available:

Column Name	Description
Server	The name of the server that these statistics are for
Hour	The hour of the day that these statistics are for
ConnectorId	The name of the Send or Receive connector
MessageCountOut	The number of messages sent from this server
MessageCountIn	The number of messages sent to this server
TotalBytesOut	The total number of bytes sent from this server
TotalBytesIn	The total number of bytes sent to this server
AverageBytesOut	The average bytes per message sent from this server
AverageBytesIn	The average bytes per message sent to this server
MinimumBytesOut	The smallest message sent from this server
MinimumBytesIn	The smallest sent to this server
MaximumBytesOut	The largest message sent from this server
MaximumBytesIn	The largest message sent to this server

Open the csv file in Excel and suddenly you can do all kinds of smart graphs, pivot tables and filters to answer not only the above questions, but many more beyond that.

We hope that this will help others in their endeavours with Microsoft Exchange!

*** As always the script is provided on an as is basis, please test it before you use it in a production environment. ***

Get-MessageStatistics.ps1

Twan van Beers

Twan is a senior consultant with over 30 years of experience. He has a wide range of skills including Messaging, Active Directory, SQL, Networking and Firewalls. Twan loves to write scripts and get deep and dirty into debugging code, in order to understand and resolve the most complex of problems.