Most messaging systems provide some level of statistical reporting.
Exchange and Lotus Notes, for example, provide more than 100 different metrics, including work queue length, messages per second, active user count and maximum connections. Messaging management products go a step further and take the metrics provided by the underlying messaging system components or generate their own and massage, consolidate and report them. At a minimum, the key performance criteria to track are availability, reliability, accessibility,delivery time and capacity. Availability measures whether the messaging system components are properly functioning. Because the messaging system is dependent on communications resources, you need to have your fingers on the pulse of the underlying network components to determ ine their health.