Health and Performance Requirements

Monitoring the health and performance of the environment should be a top priority for any Lync Server deployment. Without the proper tools in place, guaranteeing service availability and troubleshooting service quality issues are nearly impossible. Lync Server 2013 spans many different IT systems in order to provide services to end users. Monitoring the Lync solution from end to end enables administrators to confidently support all Lync modalities. At the same time, solutions that monitor the entire Lync solution enable upper management to have insight into the health of the environment, and to have confidence in the system deployed.

Monitoring the health of the Lync environment can be accomplished in various ways. The details of how to use these tools for health monitoring are described in later sections but they include the following:

• Windows event logs

• Lync synthetic transactions

• System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)

• Third-party (non-Microsoft) monitoring solutions

In addition to monitoring the overall health of the environment, the performance of the system should be carefully monitored. When Lync is being deployed, careful planning will ensure that capacity requirements are met. However, it is important to identify performance baselines and to monitor system performance for issues. There are many instances in which systems can malfunction, or usage has simply increased, which can result in service degradation. Although performance is a contributing factor to the health of the environment, it is important to identify performance baseline establishment and ongoing monitoring as a separate task in the deployment and post-deployment phases.

Performance can be monitored using various tools. This chapter outlines how to use these tools in later sections, but they include the following:

• Windows Performance Monitor (Perfmon)

• SCOM

• Third-party network monitoring tools

When planning to establish performance baselines and performance monitoring, do not forget the supporting infrastructure such as the network, SQL Server, and, if virtualization is used, the virtual infrastructure.