Professional IIS 7.0

Chapter 18. IIS and Operations Management

After a web site has been built and deployed into a production environment, what then? How do you ensure uptime for your web application in an environment that is subject to ongoing changes, is exposed to the hailstorm of the Internet, or is subject to more traffic than any other server? How do you keep an IIS 7.0 server operational? The answers to these questions have many forms. After deploying a web server, in some ways, the work has just begun.

Maintaining a web site involves a range of knowledge, skills, and abilities. There are a few different approaches to managing the operations of IIS servers, and all of them have some merit. You will, undoubtedly, want control and predictability from your site on an ongoing basis. Most technicians involved in managing operations will value a constant flow of information and metrics.

In this chapter, we introduce some important topics related to managing production IIS servers. To keep your servers up and the hosted applications functioning properly, you need a way to organize your team differently from when the application was under development. You need a system and organization suited to respond to the daily troubles that plague today's web server, and to be proactive about ensuring the viability of your investment in the hosted application. We review some of the best sources for putting together a world-class structure for ensuring uptime. We begin by looking more at organizational processes, ...