Monday, January 23, 2012

"Outlook is slow..." Here's some information on how to troubleshoot why.

Neil Johnson - a rock 'n roll nerd.... - Outlook Performance Troubleshooting including Office 365

"I have been involved in a number of discussions recently regarding Outlook performance troubleshooting in the cloud. Mostly these discussions were in the context of why the customer didn't want to move to the cloud since they figured it would be impossible to troubleshoot Outlook performance afterwards

Discussion Summary:

When we have clients and Exchange on terra firma we can monitor some performance counters such as RPC Average Latency on Exchange and use the Outlook and client performance counters to establish if a poor end user experience is being caused by the Exchange Server, the Network or the Client machine. If we move the messaging service out to the Office 365 cloud we can no longer monitor RPC Average Latency so we don't know if poor performance at the client is being caused by network or the Exchange server.

Outlook Performance

This started me thinking about how to deal with this situation and what items make up the client experience from an Outlook performance perspective.

The following items can both have a fairly dramatic effect on Outlook client performance and either could cause the end customer to pick up the phone to support and say that "E-mail is slow".

  • MAPI RPC Latency
  • Client system performance

If we make the assumption that our service is running in the Office 365 cloud, how do we go about determining the actual cause of Outlook performance problems?

...

  • MAPI RPC Latency
  • Client System Performance
    • Client CPU
    • Client RAM
    • Client Disk I/O
  • HDD Usage
    • Physical Disk\Disk Queue Length
    • Contiguous OST File

...

image..."

Some good information and things to look for when troubleshooting Outlook performance issues.

No comments: