Hello Everyone

We have Exchange Server 2010 SP1 deployed in our enterprise.

We have a HUB Transport server as well as an Edge Server . We have approximately 600 mailbox users.

Currently the Message Tracking Log Time Period is 1 month (Default).  We need to change it to 2 Years.

Please let me know what are things I need to check, risks/things to be considerer before and after making the change.

Thanks in Advance

Hi,

I find sometimes 30 days is not quite enough for some investigations. If your logs are being backed up you can always consider restoring older logs from backup if required.  When you think about increasing the log time duration, consider your servers disk capacity as well as the impact that more log files has on the amount of time some tracking log searches will take.

Open the Exchange Management Shell console and determine your servers identity and verify logging is enabled with either of these commands.

Get-TransportServer | Select Name,MessageTrackingLogEnabled | ft -auto
Get-MailboxServer | Select Name,MessageTrackingLogEnabled | ft -auto
Here you can check the current Message Logging values. It also aids in determining which switches to set.

Get-MailboxServer YourServerName | fl messagetracking*

You should see something like this

MessageTrackingLogEnabled : True
MessageTrackingLogMaxAge : 30.00:00:00
MessageTrackingLogMaxDirectorySize : 1000 MB (1,048,576,000 bytes)
MessageTrackingLogMaxFileSize : 10 MB (10,485,760 bytes)
MessageTrackingLogPath : C:\Program Files\Exchange\TransportRoles\Logs\MessageTracking
MessageTrackingLogSubjectLoggingEnabled : True

Change your values to something more useful. In my case, space was not an issue so I enabled logging for 365 days and allocated 10 GB for log files.

Set-TransportServer YourServerName -MessageTrackingLogMaxAge 365
Set-TransportServer YourServerName -MessageTrackingLogMaxDirectorySize 10000MB

Check below link for more details.

https://ranaprem.wordpress.com/2015/07/20/exchange-server-2010-changing-message-tracking-log-retention-period/

Hi Avi,

Something more on the " disk capacity ", you can run an estimate on what is the average logs size for a month and multiply it by 24 to see what is the expected\required disk capacity.

Keeping logs of 3months on the server should be enough for troubleshooting most of the cases, however as Manu said, you can keep the remaining data in a backup, to be used when req

Hi,

By default, the maximum age for any message tracking log file is 30 days. Circular logging deletes the oldest message tracking log files if the message tracking log directory reaches its specified maximum size or a message tracking log file reaches its specified maximum age.

If you want to change the maximum age of message tracking logs to 2 years(730 days) on transport servers, use the following syntax.

Set-TransportServer Exch10 -MessageTrackingLogMaxAge 730.00:00:00

As all above suggestions, if you increase the maximum age of the message tracking logs longer, the logs file would be saved in the disk more and more. If you persist to do this settings, we can change the location for message tracking logs to save it.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa997984(v=exchg.141).aspx

Regards,