EVERYTHING. You\u2019ve thought about everything and your email — your company\u2019s most critical service — is under control.<\/strong><\/p>\n That\u2019s when your mobile starts to buzz.<\/p>\n One text message, then another, then another\u2026 Dozens of messages start pouring in. There\u2019s not time to read one, the next is already here. There\u2019s James, from Accounts, who\u2019s asking \u201cWhen will it be back on? I need to finish something urgent\u201d; Stephanie from Sales \u201cNeed I remind you that the contract has to be out today?\u201d; and Peter from R&D \u201cWhat do I do? I\u2019m supposed to deliver a patch this afternoon!?\u201d\u2026<\/p>\n That\u2019s when Bob, hacker extraordinaire, calls.<\/p>\n \u2013 \u201cWe have a problem\u201d, he says.<\/p>\n As sweat drips down your forehead, Bob breaks the news:<\/p>\n \u2013 \u201cThe email service is down!\u201d<\/p>\n \u2013 \u201cWhat!? What happened?! Have we been attacked? Malware? An issue with our datacentre? Our virtualisation platform?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cNo, nothing like that\u2026\u00a0<\/p>\n In the era of digital technology, hybrid clouds, AI all around, digital revolution, process monitoring and data and solutions observability, you might have thought that the first cause of email breakdown would be a power issue at your datacentre or a poorly calibrated hybrid platform\u2026 well no. Unlikely as it may sound, your run-of-the-mill \u201cdisk\u00a0full<\/strong>\u201d issue from prehistoric times has struck!<\/p>\n That\u2019s right\u2026 your email server\u2019s disk is out of space.<\/strong><\/p>\n Most likely it\u2019s a mail spool issue (where the messages are stored). The mail service wobbles then collapses, operations fail, the server spews error messages and finally crashes. Users can no longer use the service and the webmail sends an endless flow of error messages until it just stops responding.<\/p>\n More rarely, the \u201cdisk full\u201d issue might come from the system itself, but the other typical cause is logs. Your email system generates a lot of logs. If logs aren\u2019t stored in a separate partition, which is often the case, the whole system crashes<\/strong>!<\/p>\n BlueMind\u2019s TICK monitoring<\/a>\u00a0tool helps get to the bottom of things! Its dashboards show you the state of your users\u2019 disk space almost in real time. Data history is kept for 7 days, that way you can go back to the system\u2019s state before and<\/em> at the time of the incident. You can also use it to program a disk space alert!<\/p>\n At last, you can relax. It\u2019s nothing major, and it could have been avoided, but it can be fixed. You\u2019re still in time to catch your plane and save your holidays.<\/p>\n But Bob the Hacker clears his throat. He has more bad news\u2026<\/p>\n Mail systems\u2019 virtual machines<\/strong> (VMs) share resources with other instances on virtualised platforms. The CPU (Central Processing Unit) — i.e. the engine that runs all platform systems and program instructions — is one of those resources.\u00a0<\/p>\n CPU demand on the system is usually fairly low — besides a few usage spikes — and the whole point of virtualisation is to share CPU between systems and VMs. However, if there are too many VMs or excess load on some of them, CPU demand may overload the platform which is no longer able to assign CPU to meet your VMs\u2019 needs.<\/p>\n \u201cSteal time\u201d<\/strong> is the percentage of time a VM has to wait for CPU to be available when it has made a request \u2013 i.e. the time when the platform is too busy serving other VMs to respond to yours.<\/p>\n Steal time should be watched because it can cause major problems. For tasks that need to be executed in near-real time such as responding quickly to multiple web or database requests, a drop in performance may lead to a backlog of requests which will slow the system down and possibly end up in errors or failures<\/strong>.<\/p>\n If your virtual machine shows a high steal time, this means that CPUs are being taken away from your VM for other purposes. You may be using too many processor resources or the physical server may be overloaded. Try giving your virtual machine more processor resources<\/strong> if the platform isn\u2019t bursting at the seams, or move the VM to another physical server.<\/strong><\/p>\n \u2013 \u201cOk, Bob, you can fix this, right?\u201d you ask nervously.<\/p>\n \u2013 \u201cSure, Boss.\u00a0BlueMind monitors steal time history<\/u><\/a>, so we\u2019ve been able to fix the issue.\u201d<\/p>\n As you\u2019re about to hang up \u2013 drenched in sweat but reassured \u2013 Bob strikes the final blow:<\/p>\n \u2013 \u201cOne last thing \u2026<\/p>\n Who hasn\u2019t grumbled about some website prompting you to choose a password that contains 70% of consonants, 3 uppercase letters, 2 prime numbers and one ancient Greek character? Yet these requirements aren\u2019t to no avail.<\/p>\n A weak or unchanged default password can compromise the security of your account which can be used to send SPAM<\/strong> massively. Spam is the scourge of email<\/a>.<\/u> It will flood your server, but worse still, you\u2019ll be put on a blacklist of SPAM senders and your emails will be rejected by recipient servers<\/strong> (anti-spam programs will block your server\u2019s flow) and it will usually take at least a few days \u2013 after the issue has been corrected \u2013 for the situation to go back to normal.<\/p>\n Be careful, though, forcing your users to change passwords too often may encourage them to use increasingly easier passwords (so that they can remember them), or to write them on huge post-it notes stuck on their computer screen.<\/p>\n With BlueMind, you can set up a forced password policy <\/a>to avoid this.<\/p>\n If you\u2019re using an external password manager — e.g. through your LDAP directory — the most effective option is to generate a complex password or encourage your users to choose a different password for each account<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Bob concludes.<\/p>\n You\u2019d been so busy planning ahead for the most complex disasters that you\u2019d forgotten the most important thing: monitoring a set of simple indicators on a regular basis can help you avoid quite a few problems which can be as basic as they can be incapacitating for users<\/strong>.<\/p>\n The moral of the story is, no matter how good \u201cBob\u201d is, he will never replace a good monitoring system!<\/p>\n If you want to know more about monitoring your email system, please read our blog article<\/u><\/a> about monitoring a BlueMind installation or watch\u00a0our monitoring tool\u2019s presentation video (french only)<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0contact us<\/a>\u00a0so that we can discuss it!<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":1288,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[179,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1296","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-solution-en","category-usages-en"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/bluemind.purpl-web.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/07\/spongebob.jpg\")
<\/p>\n\u00a0The main hard disk is full\u201d<\/strong><\/h1>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/bluemind.purpl-web.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/07\/image1-1.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/bluemind.purpl-web.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/07\/20180703190744-rollsafe-meme.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n\u201cBoss, someone\u2019s stealing our cpu\u201d<\/strong><\/h1>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/bluemind.purpl-web.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/07\/rym972-920x584.jpg\")
<\/p>\nWe\u2019ve been blacklisted, our passwords are too weak!\u201d<\/strong><\/h1>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/bluemind.purpl-web.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/07\/password-reset_o_5950893.jpg\")
<\/p>\n\u00a0\u201cRelax and enjoy your holidays\u201d<\/strong><\/h1>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/bluemind.purpl-web.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/07\/telechargement.jpg\")
<\/p>\n