Professional Microsoft IIS 8

Monitoring Websites

With performance data, you can establish patterns that define peak periods of activity, audit capacity, build detailed upgrade plans, and learn how all the parts of your system really interact. Unfortunately, administrators are often unable to act on the data they collect—sometimes because they don't have a roadmap. The goal of this chapter is to help you not only collect the right data, but also to beat the odds and intelligently tune your system in the process of maximizing performance across the entire web service.

To help you with your task, the following major performance and optimization areas are discussed in this chapter:

• Http.sys (kernel mode request processing)
• Memory usage
• Processor utilization
• Disk I/O
• Network bandwidth
• Bandwidth throttling
• Web connections
• HTTP compression
• Site configuration

We'll dig deeper into each of these areas and provide what you need to know for a comprehensive monitoring program. Before going into the details of what to monitor, it makes sense first to talk about how you monitor an IIS server. After all, the tools you use will dictate the options you have for monitoring. The following section introduces some of the tools that you can use on a Windows Server 2012 server running IIS 8.0.

How to Monitor IIS 8.0

For complex web applications that span two or more servers, with business demands for consistent performance, you may find it necessary to invest in a commercial monitoring solution, if you don't already have one in ...