Chapter 7. Microsoft Lync Server 2013 Monitoring and Archiving

Both the Monitoring role and the Archiving role have changed significantly since Lync Server 2010. The biggest change is that neither of them is a dedicated server role any longer. Although they remain logically separate, they are now collocated with the Lync Server 2013 Front End role. In fact, they are now simply listed as an option during the Front End Wizard in Topology Builder. As such, there won’t be traditional “installation steps” as you’ll find in the other chapters in this section. Instead, this chapter covers both roles at a high level and discusses how they apply to the Lync environment as a whole.

The Monitoring role in Lync Server 2013 has evolved from previous versions. For those new to Lync, the Monitoring role is actually an agent that lives on each Front End Server in a pool and collects and manages information from the Front End, Mediation, and other server roles and stores it in a database separate from the one used by the Front End. It leverages SQL Server Reporting Services to create reports related to call quality and metrics. These reports are often used for ROI (return on investment) justification. For example, if the legacy conferencing provider charged $.10 per minute and after conferencing was moved to OCS the current report showed 100,000 minutes of usage, then the company saved $10,000 in conferencing costs for that month. I’ve found that most companies can achieve 100% ROI in one to three months after deployment, even in large, highly redundant deployments.

The Archiving role in Lync Server 2013 primarily serves the purposes of legal compliance. That said, other companies might want to have a centrally searchable archive for other purposes because the Archive server role is able to archive communications across both IM and meetings. New to the 2013 generation of products, Lync archiving data can now be stored in a central repository with archived email in an Exchange 2013 environment; however, that is beyond the scope of this book. This chapter focuses on the native Lync Server 2013 tools as related to archiving.

The Archiving role scales well with the Front End collocated service capable of handling all the users hosted by the pool.

The Archiving Server role can archive the following content:

• Peer-to-peer instant messages

• Multiparty instant messages

• Web conferences, including uploaded content and events (for example, join, leave, upload)

• Audio/video for peer-to-peer instant messages and web conferences

• Web conferencing annotations and polls

Organizations should decide before the implementation of the Archiving role how archiving will be configured. Decisions around site and user-based archiving must be made. It is also critical to determine how archive data will be managed. The archiving database was not meant to be a long-term retention solution, and as such, Lync Server 2013 does not provide an e-discovery solution for archived data. Various third-party solutions, however, are optimized for e-discovery within archived Lync data. This data should optimally be moved to other storage or collocated with Exchange 2013.