Nagios Alerts – Setting Up Nagios Alerts by Telephone

As you stated, because Exchange uses the store.exe process for all mailbox databases, it is not possible to monitor individual mailbox database that way. There may be ways to do so by talking directley to Exchange, but I don't know of any process for Nagios that can do that.

The store.exe process is the Exchange Information Store service, this can be monitored by Nagios. If the mailbox databases dismounts because of diskspace issues, and many other issues it is likely this server will have stopped as well. Monitoring this should give you a good indication of mailbox issues

This article is an excellent tutorial on setting up monitoring for Exchange services and includes a lot of info on the different things you can check to monitor your Exchange servers health.

[Edit]

Windows Performance Counters does have a counter for the Exchange store, the MSExchangeIS Mailbox, counter so this may also be able to be used.

not an answer really, but some pointers:

• definitivly take a look at presentation about nagios @ goldman sachs. they faced problems you mention - redundancy, scalability: thousands of hosts, also automated configuration generation.

• i had redundant nagios setup but at much smaller scale - 80 servers, ~1k services in total. one dedicated master server, one slave server pulling configuration from master at regular intervals few times a day. both servers covered monitoring of the same machines, they had health cross-check between each other. i used nagios mostly as framework for invoking custom product specific checks [ bunch of cron jobs executing scripts doing 'artificial flow controls', results ware logged to sql, nrpe plugins ware checking for successful / failed executions of those in last x minutes ]. all worked very nicely.

• your quorum logic sounds good - a bit similar to my 'artificial flows' - basically go on, ipmplement your self ;-]. and have nrpe just check some kind of flag [ or sql db with timestamp-status ] how things are doing.

• you'll probably want to build some hierarchy to scale - you'll have some nodes that gather overview of other nodes, do look at presentation from first point. default nagios forking for every single check is overkill at higher number of monitored services.

to answer some questions:

• in my case environment monitored was typical master-slave setup [ primary sql or app server + hot standby ], no master-master.
• my setup involved 'human filtering factor' - resolver group who was a 'backup' for sms notification. there was already paid group of technicians who for other reasons had 24/5 shifts, they got 'checking nagios mails' as additional task not putting too much load on them. and they ware in charge of making sure that db-admins / it-ops / app-admins ware actually getting up and fixing problems ;-]
• i've heard lot's of good things about zabbix - for alerting and plotting trends, but never used it. for me munin does the trick, i have hacked simple nagios plugin checking if there is 'any red' [ critical ] color on munin list of servers - just an additional check. you can as well read values from munin rrd-files to decrease number of queries you send to monitored machine.