Re: Quality Assurance of mailserver?

[Camaleón <noelamac@gmail.com>]

On Sat, 14 May 2011 12:19:36 +0200, Lars Nielsen wrote:

> I am running a mailserver with exim, courier-pop, courier-imap and
> squirrelmail. I has been running "fine" for about 18 months now. But how
> can I assure my self and my customers that I deliver a good quality
> mail-server? 

You can endorse a SLA (Service Level Agreement) that ensures and metrics 
some basic aspects of your service.

> How can I best monitor the services to assure that there
> are the desired uptime and response-times?
> 
> I am running on a lenny installation.

There are many things to monitor, starting from the server performance 
and uptime and also the network availability. For those tasks there 
exists some monitoring applications that you can locally install in your 
servers to provide a good set of statistics, for you and for your users.

Wikidepia has a very nice and complete comparison chart for such tools:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_network_monitoring_systems

There are also third-party services that remotely monitor the status of 
your server and services, like Pingdom:

http://www.pingdom.com/

While these external services are not very accurate, they can give you 
similar look to what your clients are seeing from their side.

Greetings,

-- 
Camaleón