I have fielded several interesting questions recently about how our monitoring systems work, some of them asking if we can monitor very specific technologies. The short answer is generally, yes- if it is online and can be reached either outside of your firewall via our dozens of monitoring locations, or if it can be reached behind your firewall using our private agent or MetricsView Collectors, we can monitor it. If it is a web based technology that can be rendered in standard web browsers, we are capable of monitoring for both uptime and performance.
Blackberry Server Monitoring
Specifically, Someone recently asked if we had the capability to monitor a Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES). While we don’t have custom code that interacts directly with the BES, we have a number of monitoring tools that can interact with Microsoft Exchange Server as well as other email servers.
Monitoring Blackberry Exchange Server Performance
One unique feature we provide is our Microsoft ActiveSync monitoring, which is able to connect to a Microsoft exchange server using activesync, access an email account, send an email and retrieve the email- ensuring the activesync server is running and able to process both send and receive requests. This capability is further extended to any email server with the SMTP and POP/IMAP monitoring. Through the use of these tools, we can interact with a BES for exchange server. This would also apply to BES for Domino as well as BES for GroupWise.
Blackberry Email Server Management
Blackberry devices use their own proprietary protocol to communicate with Blackberry enabled mail servers. The Blackberry Server Routing Protocol (SRP) has not been publicly documented by Blackberry, which means it is difficult for third parties to monitor the native protocol. Instead, we propose that you can utilize our SNMP and POP/IMAP capabilities to verify that another account is able to successfully send and receive email from a BES enabled email server.
We can initiate sending an email to a mailbox serviced by Blackberry via SMTP. On the Blackberry server you can setup the test email account to auto forward incoming messages to a free service such as Gmail or Yahoo mail. Next, you can monitor and retrieve the message from the external service using the POP3/IMAP service. Utilizing these services cooperatively, you are thus able to verify that the blackberry server was accepting email, processing mailbox rules, and sending mail outside the domain. Alternatively, if you simply want to know if the server is up and responding to requests, you could simply run a port scan test on port 3301.
As you can see, while we may not have the exact specialty tools required to perform a very specific test, our broad toolset includes a combination of tools that allow us to record more complex interactions with online servers such as a Blackberry enterprise server.
