Disable Inbound Proxy Probe Messages for Journaling

During a recent Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2013 migration, we ran into an issue with Managed Availability in Exchange 2013. Managed Availability provides health monitoring services.

This particular client is performing journaling by enabling journaling on each database and configuring all messages to be sent to a journaling mailbox in a separate database. They then have archiving software that removes the messages from the journaling mailbox. This allows them to retain a copy of all messages sent or received in the organization.

As we implemented Exchange 2013, the journaling mailbox was filled with messages generated by Managed Availability. The messages were from inboundproxy@contoso.com with a subject of Inbound proxy probe to a health mailbox.

Managed Availability was sending messages through the transport system to health mailboxes to verify that the system was functioning normally. However, this was resulting in a lot of messages that were not required being journaled. To avoid this, there are two options:

1. Use a Journaling rule for specific users or group membership instead.
2. Disable some monitors in Managed Availability.

I'm always reluctant to disable basic functionality in the system. So, our first attempt was by using a journaling rule with a dynamic distribution group for all users. When we did this we found that it was not reliably journaling the messages. So, we abandoned the journaling rule option and chose to disable the monitors generating the email messages instead.

In a knowledgebase article, Microsoft provides the following three commands for disabling the messages:

Add-GlobalMonitoringOverride -Identity "FrontendTransport\OnPremisesSmtpClientSubmission" -PropertyName Enabled -PropertyValue 0 -ApplyVersion "15.0.620.29" -ItemType Probe

Add-GlobalMonitoringOverride -Identity "MailboxTransport\Mapi.Submit.Probe" -PropertyName Enabled -PropertyValue 0 -ApplyVersion "15.0.620.29" -ItemType Probe

Add-GlobalMonitoringOverride -Identity "FrontendTransport\OnPremisesInboundProxy" -PropertyName Enabled -PropertyValue 0 -ApplyVersion "15.0.620.29" -ItemType Probe

Note:
In these commands, you must provide the -ApplyVersion parameter which specifies which version of Exchange Server that the override applies to. When you apply new updates to your system, you must run these commands again.

To identify the version of Exchange you are running, you can use the following command:

Get-ExchangeServer | FL Name,AdminDisplayVersion

The Microsoft documentation does not talk about it, but unless you have a single database, you have more than one OnPremisesInboundProxy monitor. There is an OnPremisesInboundProxy monitor for each database and is unique for the health mailbox associated with each database and you need create an override for each one. On this system with four mailbox databases, the identity of each monitor was:

• FrontendTransport\OnPremisesInboundProxy
• FrontendTransport\OnPremisesInboundProxy_2
• FrontendTransport\OnPremisesInboundProxy_3
• FrontendTransport\OnPremisesInboundProxy_4

To identify all of the OnPremisesInboundProxy monitors on your system, you can use the following command:

(Get-WinEvent -LogName Microsoft-Exchange-ActiveMonitoring/ProbeDefinition | % {[XML]$_.toXml()}).event.userData.eventXml | ?{$_.Name -like "OnPremisesInboundProxy*"}

After creating an override for each instance of OnPremisesInboundProxy, all of the Inbound Proxy Probe messages were disabled.

Note:
To ensure that the monitoring overrides take effect, you need to restart the Microsoft Exchange Diagnostics and Microsoft Exchange Health Manager services on all Exchange 2013 servers.

Additional resources:

• http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2823959
• http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2013/08/13/customizing-managed-availability.aspx
• http://www.expta.com/2012/12/exchange-2013-health-check-monitors-and.html