Microsoft’s Exchange Best Practices Analyzer (ExBPA) has been around for a few years now and it’s an excellent preventative maintenance and troubleshooting resource. ExBPA was recently joined by the Exchange Server Troubleshooting Assistant (ExTRA) which, according to the Microsoft website:

“[…] Programmatically executes a set of troubleshooting steps to identify the root cause of performance, mail flow, and database mounting issues. The tool automatically determines what set of data is required to troubleshoot the identified symptoms and collects configuration data, performance counters, event logs and live tracing information from an Exchange server and other appropriate sources. The tool analyzes each subsystem to determine individual bottlenecks and component failures, then aggregates the information to provide root cause analysis.”

ExTRA v1.1 brings together a number of troubleshooting tools: the Exchange Server Disaster Recovery Analyzer (ExDRA); the Exchange Server Performance Troubleshooting Analyzer (ExPTA); and the Exchange Server Mail Flow Analyzer (ExMFA). Furthermore, ExTRA is integrated in the ESM Toolbox for Exchange Server 2007.