Chapter 19 covers Monitoring and Reporting. It is a fairly short chapter only 16 pages long. Since monitoring and reporting are so easy to setup, it is natural this chapter is so short.

The chapter starts off with the decision to monitor. Of course you should always monitor. Report and alert types are covered. The performance and usage reports are very easy to set up and will give you a good synopsis of your server and user activities. Remember to read these daily and to followup on any errors it reports to you. If no one will do anything with these reports, why run them? The reports will run at 6 am everyday and e-mailed to whomever you choose. You can change the time if you prefer. Performance alerts will be e-mailed to you immediately.

Monitoring and alerts topic is covered next. How do you setup monitoring? As with most other things SBS, here comes the wizard! Follow the wizard to setup the monitoring report. These reports can be viewed internally or externally.

Next, the chapter spends several pages breaking down what is in each report. Most things are self explanatory and the book admits to that. The default reports can be changed. Sending yourself log attachments is covered here. You can even add extra logs for monitoring if you choose to do so. Getting too many alerts can overwhelm you especially if you have multiple servers to care for. These parameters can be adjusted so you only get what is truly important to you.

Troubleshooting comes next. It's pretty simple. Rerun the wizard will fix the issue. Want to change the report name? Open up HKEY_Local_Machine\Software\Microsoft\SmallBusinessServer and double click RegisteredOrganization and type the name in the value field. The chapter closes with Best practices.

Chapter 20 will be next. It covers group policy. Something I sorely need to learn so I am looking forward to it. That chapter is 29 pages long, so stay tuned.