The Get-EDSData project

If you saw my blog post last week on Pulling performance counter data from daily performance logs you now know, as I do, that Exchange 2013 records a ton of performance data on your Exchange server by default. I was recently out on a walk, where I do some of my best thinking, trying to come up with a way to make use of all that data. Thusly was the Get-EDSData project was born. I am by no means a PowerShell expert. I’m not quite a PowerShell novice, but honestly I am probably closer to being a novice than an expert.

Read more

Preventing accidentally deleted accounts from syncing via DirSync

Believe it or not, I’ve done some pretty dumb things. I’ve deleted all kinds of things that I should not have, and I’m fairly confident that I’ll do more dumb things in the future. The best I can do is know that I am going to screw things up and try to figure out ways to make sure I can recover from screw ups when they happen. It that vein, I was pretty happy to discover a new DirSync setting that helps prevent the accidental deletion of large numbers of AD accounts from Azure AD and/or Office 365.

Read more

Pulling performance counter data from daily performance logs

Exchange 2013 collects a lot of performance data on itself by default. By a lot I mean that your Exchange 2013 server has data for about 3,000 performance counters for the last seven days sitting there waiting for you to access them. The problem, however, is that it is not readily apparent how to use this data in its native form. If you open the DailyPerformanceLogs folder on your Exchange 2013 server (C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\V15\Logging\Diagnostics\DailyPerformanceLogs by default) you will see 7 rather large files there with the extension .blg. On my lab servers they tend to run about 750MB each. If you open one up with performance monitor you’ll see a useless tangle of lines that will lend you absolutely no assistance in diagnosing the performance issues on your Exchange server. So how do you glean useful information from these logs? Well read the answers are below.

Read more

Office 365 tenant administrator roles have changed

For the last 3 years, Office 365 has had a rather poor set of choices for the roles you can assign to your administrators. The old administrator roles for Office 365 are; Billing admin, Global admin, Password admin Service admin, and User management admin. I don’t think that these roles are terribly self-explanatory to most of the people to whom they would be assigned, and they don’t really map to real world jobs that administrators do. The only role there with usable administrate rights is global admin, the other roles are all for some level of running Office 365 itself. The Global admin role has all the rights to all the constituent parts of Office 365; Exchange, Lync, and SharePoint. In the real world, there are not many people who actually know how to work those 3 different technologies. As of this morning, Microsoft has changed the roles groups into something that looks like it makes more sense.

Read more

Office 365 feature release roadmap

I’m a pretty big fan of Office 365, not just because Office 365 migrations are the majority of how I make a paycheck. In general I think Office 365 is the current best example of “the cloud”, meaning Office 365 is the most complete and useable group of workloads that business IT departments can outsource to make both their and their users work lives better. That being said, I do have a few of issues with Office 365 and most of them are communication.

Read more

Exchange Online and the staged migration

I do a lot of Exchange Online migrations. I’m not really sure how many I have done, but I would guess the number is between 50 and 100 over the last 3 years. Over 90% of those migrations have been Hybrid. In fact, I’m pretty sure only one or two of those migrations have not been hybrid. Recently I had occasion to do a staged migration. I’d like to go through that process and discuss why I ended up making the choices I did.

Read more

Self Service Password Reset writeback to Windows Server AD using DirSync

As soon as I heard about password sync for DirSync, my first feature request was password write back. It’s been just about a year since password sync capabilities were added to DirSync and how we have password reset writeback available in public preview. There are a couple of caveats that we need to cover, but for the most part this feature is here and ready to go.

Read more

Recovering a from a datacenter failure

In previous posts (before I got all busy writing my sessions for IT connections), I promised to detail the process for recovering from a datacenter failure. For the purposes of this post I’ll assume we’re talking about a 2 site Exchange deployment with 2 Exchange servers at each site. All 4 Exchange servers are members of the same DAG, and all databases are replicated to all servers. We are also assuming that the DAG in question is running DAC mode.

Read more

My sessions at Exchange Connections conference

As Tony Redmond recently posted on his blog, the sessions for the Exchange Connections conference in Las Vegas have been set for this fall. I was honored to find out that my session submissions were accepted.

My two sessions are titled; “Identity and Authentication Management for Office 365”, and “Performance Counters You Never Knew and Why they are Important”

Even though the conference is a little over four months away, I am starting to work on my sessions now. To that end, if you have any questions that would fit into either session, please email them to me at nathan@mcsmlab.com

Strong speaker line-up for Exchange Connections 2014 | Tony Redmond's Exchange Unwashed Blog →

Some tremendous session proposals were received for Exchange Connections 2014, so I think the set that has made it to the agenda is top-class. MEC provided the Microsoft view of the world and a glimpse into the future; Connections sets out to tell the current story so that you can make the best possible use of on-premises, hybrid, or cloud Exchange. The sessions we have lined up should make for a great conference. See you in Vegas in September!