Tuesday, August 9, 2011

IIS log analysis

Recently I got a golden opportunity to go Microsoft campus located in Charlotte ,NC and work with Microsoft guys .It was related to capacity planning of our project.The project uses Silverlight technology and obviously there are WCF services to supply data to the Silverlight application.Our main aim was to do capacity planning for the WCF service side and also the database. There I got chance to work with some tools which are available for years but never used by me.One of the tool was IIS log parser.
As name implies it is the tool to parse iis logs using sql kind of queries.You can easily find out what are the top 10 file types your iis is serving or what are the top 10 urls which are requested more etc…If you are a web site production support person, this will be childish.But for a developer who just code web sites and haven’t seen how his code is performing in the production this will be a key for him to the production world.

What are IIS logs and where can I find?
These are the log entries which IIS maintain for the requests it receive and serve.by default the logs will be in the %SystemDrive%\inetpub\logs\LogFiles folder in your machine.The log file writing is normally separated by number of factors.They are generated per web site , per day etc…Also we have option to specify which all fields should be included in the log files. For example we can avoid client IP address and referrer from the logging and add number of bytes sent and received.Ok now developers who doesn’t seen this might be excited to see the logs and how to configure it. Just open your IIS and select the Logging option at the right side and double click. Rest is very simple as some clicks.A screen shot below.

For more details about how to configure and analyze the logs see the below links.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc732079%28WS.10%29.aspx
http://blogs.iis.net/carlosag/archive/2010/03/25/analyze-your-iis-log-files-favorite-log-parser-queries.aspx

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