Distribution List Traffic Reports

Apart from its ability to report comprehensively on Distribution Lists in an Exchange organization, Exchange Reporter Plus can also offer Distribution List Traffic reports. Following are the four important distribution list traffic reports from Exchange Reporter Plus:

Distribution List By Message
Distribution List By Size
Users of Distribution List By Message
Users of Distribution List By Size

These four distribution list traffic reports offer you data that will help you perform the following:

Planning expansion servers for distribution lists.
Load balancing for expansion servers or servers on which distribution lists reside.

Distribution List Traffic Summary & Server Load Balancing:

Two reports — Distribution List By Message & Distribution List By Size — help you identify the most popular (the busiest) email distribution lists in your environment. While the first report lists out distribution lists and the number of messages they received in a given period, the latter speaks of the size of the mails received.

Identifying busy distribution lists helps administrators perform expansion server load balancing easily, as they would be in a much better position to judge which free server a busy distribution list should be moved to.

Granularity:

One can filter out traffic summary for any specified time and even drill it down to hourly traffic rate. The reports also provide you the flexibility of extracting distribution list traffic summary for specified intervals, which is an important aspect that makes postmortem analysis of unusual spikes in traffic (which could be from spamming or virus attacks) easy.

Distribution List Traffic Summary & Virus Detection

Some viruses, especially spam malware or Trojans, get hold of a user´s GAL (Global Address List) and shoot out a barrage of emails to every email address contained in it. Therefore it is a good practice to monitor the number of mails a user sends to a distribution list, look for unusual piques, and prevent email onslaughts early on.

You can keep a vigil through "Users of Distribution List By Message" & "Users of Distribution List By Size", which showcase the users and the number and size of emails they sent to a distribution list in a given period. Again, with the filtering offered, it becomes easy to track any unusual spikes and take evasive actions or do a postmortem analysis.