Disabling Exchange 2013 Managed Availability monitors

Check out this blog post from Microsoft first. Mine’s mostly based on that but tailored to my specific situation.

We have a CAS server that’s purely for internal admin ECP functions. Managed Availability was running some ActiveSync tests on it and failing (because they don’t exist) with errors like these in SCOM:

So my mission, which I’ve chosen to accept (I saw “Mission Impossible: Fallout” this weekend!) is to disable this. :)

Managed Availability has the concept of health sets. From this page which lists all the health sets in Exchange 2013:

In Managed Availability, each component in Exchange 2013 monitors itself using probes, monitors and responders. Each Exchange 2013 component that implements Managed Availability is referred to as a health set.

So what are the unhealthy health sets on my server?

The result of this in my case are the following:

So how do I find which monitors in these health sets are failing? The following cmdlet can help:

I’ll just pipe both cmdlets to get a list of monitors across all unhealthy health sets:

In my case I get:

Should probably have filtered to just the unhealthy monitors:

Update: Re-reading this later, I realize this is all complicate and wrong. All I really need to do is Get-ServerHealth -Identity <server name>. I don’t need to loop over each health set. 

Anyways, the SCOM error referred to an EAS component, but I don’t see anything with that name. ActiveSyncProxy is probably the one it was referring to?

As an aside, if I want to see the components of a health set (i.e. the monitors, probes, responders) I can do the following:

In the case of the ActiveSync.Proxy health set (which has the ActiveSyncProxy component) I can see:

Note that the ActiveSyncProxyTestMonitor monitor is what was showing as unhealthy earlier.

To disable a monitor I need to use the Add-ServerMonitoringOverride cmdlet. This is of the format:

In my case, to disable ActiveSync.Proxy (health set) ActiveSyncProxyTestMonitor (monitoring item – you can see this in the list of unhealthy monitors as well as in the list above) I do:

That’s it. Wait a while and now it will appear as disabled.

Next thing is how do I find out why the ActiveSync health set is unhealthy? Let’s take a  look at the probes in that:

I can invoke the probe manually using the following cmdlet:

Pipe this out as a list to read better. Here’s what I did:

The output gives the errors encountered by the tests. I could see that it was related to EAS so decided to disable it too.

Lastly, if you are curious as to what overrides exist the following cmdlet will help:

Also, if you want to double check that a particular component on the Exchange server is inactive (and that’s why monitors are failing) the following cmdlet will help (I sort it by state for easy reading but that’s optional):

The last section of the article I referred to at the beginning of this post on editing C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\V15\Bin\Monitoring\Config\ClientAccessProxyTest.xml to disable certain probes. Not sure why they suggest that instead of disabling probes via the cmdlet – I think that’s because the cmdlets way is more of a temporary thing (for a certain duration) while modify the config file is a permanent fix. I should probably do the config file in my case.