If you need to quickly check the health of a protocol, Microsoft Exchange 2013 onwards provides a URL that you can query to ascertain the health of the service. Obviously if you query this and get nothing (i.e. a timeout) you can assume something is wrong, or if you get anything other than a “200 OK” response you know there is an issue. This mechanism can be really handy for verifying the availability of a particular Exchange Server if you are using Load Balancers in-front of your Exchange Servers that can automatically direct traffic to a functional server.
For example if you wanted to check the ActiveSync protocol health you can open in your web browser the following link:
https://email.domain.com/Microsoft-Server-ActiveSync/healthcheck.htmYou should be prompted for a username and password in a simple password dialog box, enter your credentials and then you’ll see (if all is well):
200 OK<br/>EXCH-SVR-2.DOMAIN.COMWhere in this example, we have two Exchange Servers called EXCH-SVR-1 and EXCH-SVR-2 behind a Kemp Load Master (Load Balancer), so I’m being directed to a operating server.
You can use this same technique for other services as follows and depending on your configuration you may or may not need to login.
https://<External FQDN>/<protocol>/healthcheck.htmThe possible protocol values are:
- OWA for Outlook Web App
- ECP for Exchange Control Panel (i.e. User Options in OWA)
- OAB for Offline Address Book
- AutoDiscover for the Autodiscover process (also something that is used by Lync clients)
- EWS for Exchange Web Services (i.e. Mailtips, Free/Busy etc. Also used by Outlook for Mac)
- Microsoft-Server-ActiveSync for Exchange ActiveSync
- RPC for Outlook Anywhere
- MAPI for the new MAPI/HTTPS (successor to the RPC over HTTPs protocol used in Outlook Anywhere).