Professional Microsoft IIS 8

Management Approaches

Professional websites almost always require some level of predictable uptime and some sort of minimum performance goals. Few would be happy with a website that responded inconsistently or sporadically every day. Of course, the margin of error, or window of acceptable downtime, will vary greatly depending on the nature of the website and the role it plays in fulfilling the mission of a business. A professional website is a valued tool, whether it's used occasionally for simple text updates or used extensively by customers to conduct e-commerce transactions.

In many cases, a particular website is just one site among many and might be hosted on a server that depends on a network infrastructure with complex (and often fragile) ties to other systems in your organization. The point here is that not only may a website break on its own, but it can also fail for reasons beyond the web server administrator's control. In this kind of environment, ensuring uptime and performance is a matter of operational management.

Managing operations for IIS applications and servers is about meeting expectations for the website every day. Control, predictability, and information flow are all key elements of IT operations management. If you have web servers in operation, yet lack operational systems, then where can you turn to get started?

Two excellent sources for great tools are the widely recognized authorities on technical management: the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) and the ...