Monitoring Number of Emails Sent Per Second
 

Hey Hey! Ok this post is going to be pretty vague - I'm more looking for a conceptual solution rather than a specific one.

The company I work for sends out a newsletter to its members a few times each month. During each mailing we send out roughly 800,000 messages - not spam mind you - our members have signed up for these newsletters.

We'd like to monitor how many emails per second each of our mail servers is sending.

Currently we do this by taking the total # of messages sent, and dividing that by the number of second it took to complete the mass mailing.

Obviously - there are huge problems with this approach so I'd like to be able to offer a more concrete answer of how many emails are being sent per second.

The MTA software we're running is MailEnable on a Win2k3 server. I'm posting this thread here because I've found the LQ community to be the most helpful with all different types of sys admin questions.

So my question is - when management asks me how many emails are our servers sending per second - short of writing a perl script to parse the 2.5GB log files - how do I give them an accurate answer? Is there any sort of monitoring solution you all use to achieve this? What kind of solutions - either software or appliance - are out there to help me provide management with more accurate statistics?

Thanks!

No idea how to monitor this on a windows box... From a *nix standpoint, I'd look at a combination of mailq and parsing /var/log/maillog as it's rolling.

No need to wait til it's done to start parsing /var/log/maillog.

If your servers are going through the same gateway/firewall, it could be possible to monitor all the outbound port 25 connections while that's going on, and get an avg connection rate from that. Would have to parse by internal IP to get a finite number per server.

hmm. I found a pretty cool tutorial here for getting the send stats of Postfix via SNMP: http://www.packetmischief.ca/network...oring/postfix/

I wonder if I could setup a Nagios box on the lan to monitor the outgoing SMTP connections of our windows mail server via SNMP...

To the bee mobile! **you mean your chevy?** yes...