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ENow Management System (EMS) Prerequisites

Thanks for choosing ENow for your monitoring and reporting needs! Our award-winning products will give you better visibility into your servers, users, and workloads, but to do that there are some prerequisites and system requirements that we want to make you aware of before beginning your installation. This document outlines the system requirements for Mailscape, Mailscape 365, Compass, and Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) monitoring.

Basic architecture 

The ENow Management System (EMS) consists of several components that must be set up or installed during the installation process: 

• The EMS web server is the central collection point for data and provides the monitoring and reporting interface for administrators. 

• Individual servers being monitored will run workload-specific clients. For example, there are separate clients for Mailscape, Compass, and Foresite that run on specific servers to report data back to the EMS web server. 

• All EMS monitoring and reporting data is stored locally in a proprietary database.  When SQL integration is enabled for reporting flexibility, additional data is stored in a SQL server database.  This SQL database can be located on the same computer as the EMS web server role, but when Mailscape is enabled as a feature we recommend a dedicated SQL Server instance on another computer.  In organizations that have separate database management teams responsible for database administration, ENow’s software supports the use of an existing SQL Server instance as long as permissions, CPU, and memory are assigned appropriately.

Active Directory requirements 

• The EMS web server should be in the same Active Directory Forest as the on premise servers (Mailscape requires that the EMS web server be in the same domain) it is monitoring.  The only exception to this requirement are servers monitored that are located in a DMZ or EDGE network. 

• Our security model requires that 2 Active Directory security groups be created and named exactly "Mailscape_Admins" and "Mailscape_Users". If the user account used to install EMS is a member of the Domain Admins security group (or Account Operators), these groups will be automatically created. If you create them manually, please plan to enter the URL http://actualwebservername:20080/Mailscapeweb in the “Notes” attribute of the "Mailscape_Admins" security group.

Network requirements 

• TCP port 20080 must be open in both directions between the EMS web server and each client machine. 

• TCP port 20081 must be open in both directions between the EMS web server and any SharePoint server being monitored. 

• TCP ports 5985 & 5986 must be open in both directions between the EMS web server and any Lync Front End server being monitored by the ENow Lync Service.  This will provide Uniscope with access to execute Lync remote PowerShell commands programmatically. 

• TCP 1433 must be open between the SQL Server computer hosting the EMS database instance and the EMS web server. 

• TCP ports 80 & 443 must be open in both directions between the EMS web server and any Lync Front End server being monitored by the ENow Lync Service.  This will provide Uniscope the ability to verify all available Lync URLs that are configured. 

• The monitoring interface on the EMS web server can be accessed via HTTP or HTTPS (required for Remote Probes). If you wish to enable the use of HTTPS, you’ll need to configure IIS on the EMS web server to permit HTTPS connections with an appropriate certificate. 

• The EMS web server will require access to the internet for various tests that are performed for Mailscape and Mailscape 365 features.

System requirements for the EMS web server 

EMS may be installed on Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1(we also require PowerShell 3.0 & .NET Framework 4.0) or Windows Server 2012 R2 or later. ENow recommends, but does not require, that you install the most current set of available Microsoft security patches. The IIS role should be enabled and configured with all available role features including IIS6 compatibility. 

The following monitoring workloads require additional software to be installed on the web server: 

• Mailscape Exchange on-premises custom reporting requires the Exchange administration tools for the version of Exchange you’re using to be installed from the Exchange installation media.
• Mailscape 365 monitoring requires the following:
  • the Microsoft Online Services Sign-in Assistant 
  • the Microsoft Online Services Module for Windows PowerShell
  • Run Set-ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted to allow unsigned PowerShell scripts to run from the web server.
  • If you want to monitor Skype for Business Online, install the Skype for Business client on the web server.

 EMS Web Server service account permission requirements: all products 

• The ENow SQL Service Windows service requires a service account that has the DB Owner role on the SQL Server computer for the “Mailscape” database and local administrator rights on the EMS web server.  

  • If the DBA pre-creates this database before EMS is installed, you will need to manually create and assign permissions to the service account.  

  • If the “Mailscape” database is created by our installer, we will create the service account and assign it the db_owner role on the database. 

  • If Mailscape is enabled as a feature with the Exchange management tools installed on the EMS web server, then please make sure that the ENow SQL Service account is a member of the View-only Organization Management security group and also allow access to the Exchange server URLs using HTTPS from the EMS web server.  This will ensure that the PowerShell based custom reports will function properly. 

  • If Compass is enabled as a feature, then please allow LDAP connection from the EMS web server. 

  • If Uniscope is enabled as a feature, then the following explicit permissions are required to be effective on the LcsCDR and QoEMetrics databases: CONNECT, EXECUTE, SELECT.

• The ENow Namespace Monitor Windows service performs tasks for Mailscape related features only. 

  • If Exchange 2007 or 2010 are being monitored, then the service can be configured to run as local system and this is enabled automatically by the installation program. 

  • If Exchange 2013 or 2016 are being monitored, then the service should be configured to run as a domain account that is a local administrator of the EMS web server and a member of the Exchange Organization Management security group.  In addition, the Exchange Management Tools should be installed on the EMS web server.  Meeting these specific requirements will ensure that the Server Components State dashboard monitoring feature will be functioning properly. 

• The ENow Lync Service Windows service performs tasks for Uniscope related features only and is configured to run as local system by default. 

  • The Uniscope monitoring test for the Central Management Database server will require the local system to have the following explicit permissions are required to be effective on the LcsCDR and QoEMetrics databases: CONNECT, EXECUTE, SELECT.  If your security model does not allow for the local system account to be granted this permission, then a domain account should be configured and also set to run as the ENow Lync Service account.

Database and storage requirements 

• Our initial method of data storage requires a built in database to exist and grow on a local drive on the EMS web server.   It is recommended to configure the built in database to be on a separate drive from the page file.  Please plan to check sizing guide that is available from the EMS User Guide. 

• When SQL integration is enabled, we store monitoring and reporting data in SQL Server. You’ll need a computer running SQL Server 2008 or later, with an empty database instance named “Mailscape”. This database instance can be pre-created by a SQL DBA at any time. 

Disk Space usage estimates for IIS WEB (12 months) and SQL (6 months) servers are based on average daily message volume. For environments larger than 960,000 mailboxes, please email support@enowsoftware.com for configuration recommendations.

Service Account permission requirements: Client software 

Each ENow monitoring client is installed on its respective target server by running the ENowClientSetup.exe executable, which installs the appropriate client according to the target server role: 

• Mailscape Client on Exchange 2007, Exchange 2010, Exchange 2013, and Exchange 2016 servers 

• Compass Client on Windows Server 2008 R2 and later Active Directory domain controllers 

• Foresite Client on SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint 2013 servers 

• Uniscope Client on Lync 2010, Lync 2013, and Skype for Business servers 

• SQL Client on SQL server 2008 and later (this client type should be used for SharePoint and Lync or Skype for Business server SQL back end role servers). 

• AD FS and AD FS proxy clients on those respective server types 

• DirSync monitoring client on any Windows 2008 R2 or later member server

 The following table shows the permissions required for the service accounts used by each client type.  Note that all of the clients will require .NET Framework 3.5 or higher and PowerShell 2.0 or higher. 

The following table shows the permissions required for the monitoring, reporting, and test accounts used by Mailscape or Mailscape 365.  Note that all of these accounts will need to be configured from the ENow Administration Console.