How To Monitor Iis Application Pools

Prtg Manual: Perfcounter Iis Application Pool Sensor

The PerfCounter IIS Application Pool sensor monitors a Microsoft Internet Information Services application pool via Windows performance counters.

For a detailed list and descriptions of the channels that this sensor can show, see section Channel List.

PerfCounter IIS Application Pool Sensor

Sensor in Other Languages

• Dutch: PerfCounter IIS Application Pool
• French: Pool d’application IIS PerfCounter
• German: Leistungsindikator IIS-Anwendungspool
• Portuguese: Pool de aplicativos IIS via PerfCounter
• Russian: IIS
• Simplified Chinese: IIS
• Spanish: Grupo de aplicaciones PerfCounter IIS

Remarks

• This sensor requires Microsoft Internet Information Services version 7.5 or later on the target system.

• This sensor requires credentials for Windows systems in the settings of the parent device.
• This sensor requires that the Remote Registry Windows service runs on the target computer.

• This sensor requires Windows Server 2008 R2 or later on the probe system.
• This sensor supports the IPv6 protocol.

• This sensor has a low performance impact.

• This sensor uses lookups to determine the status values of one or more channels. This means that possible states are defined in a lookup file. You can change the behavior of a channel by editing the lookup file that the channel uses. For details, see section Define Lookups.

You cannot add this sensor to the hosted probe of a PRTG Hosted Monitor instance. If you want to use this sensor, add it to a remote probe device.

Add Sensor

What Is Microsoft Iis

Microsoft Internet Information Services is an extensible web server software created by Microsoft for use with the Windows family. IIS supports various protocols, including HTTP, HTTP/2, HTTPS, FTP, FTPS, SMTP, and NNTP. According to the most recent ranking by W3Techs, Microsoft IIS is the second most popular web server technology behind Apache.

IIS has numerous extensibility features. Swappable interfaces, such as ISAPI and FastCGI make it possible to use IIS with a variety of backend technologies, from micro-frameworks such as Flask to runtimes such as Node.js, along with Windows technologies such as ASP.NET.

As many key businesses rely on IIS for their web applications, ensuring that these applications are performing well is very important. In this blog, we will review the top metrics that must be tracked to ensure peak performance of Microsoft IIS-based web applications.

Next Step: Collect Iis Metrics

This post has covered some key IIS metrics for tracking the health and performance of IIS. In particular, weve illustrated the importance of monitoring the traffic and resource usage of IIS application pools alongside metrics aggregated from HTTP requests. In Part 2 of this series, we will show you how to collect these metrics from Windows Performance Counters, IIS logs, and the IIS HTTP API.

Source Markdown for this post is available on GitHub. Questions, corrections, additions, etc.? Please let us know.

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How To Monitor If Your Iis Application Is Running

The first thing you want to do is set up monitoring to ensure that your application is running.

Website Monitor Via HTTP Testing

One of the best and easiest things you can do is set up a simple HTTP check that runs every minute, which will give you a baseline to know if your site is up or down. In addition, it can also help you track how long it takes to respond.

For instance, you could monitor for a 200 OK status or similarly, the request may return specific text that you know should be included in the response.

As a side note, be careful not to rely on cached responses in your check since a 200 status response is cacheable.

Additionally, monitoring IIS via a simple HTTP check is a good way to establish a basic SLA monitor, which you can use no matter how many servers you have, to know if your web application was online and available.

For example, one of the HTTP checks we use against Elasticsearch to help with monitoring it. We do this via Retrace.

In this example, we receive alerts if the number_of_nodes is not what we are expecting or if it doesnt find an HTTP status of 200 OK.

Ensure Your IIS Application Pool Is Running

If youve been using IIS for a while, youve probably witnessed times when your application mysteriously stops working.

After some troubleshooting, you may find that your IIS Application Pool is stopped for some reason, which causes your site to go offline and your savvy users to check Downdetector to see if its you or them.

System/Process Counters

Monitor Iis Application Pools

SolarWinds SAM can monitor five instances , differentiated by application pools separately if you specify the application pool names in the component monitors.

Were Geekbuilt.®

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Ensure Your Iis Application Pool Is Running

If you have been using IIS for very long, you have probably witnessed times when your application mysteriously stops working. After some troubleshooting, you may find that your IIS Application Pool is stopped for some reason, causing your site to be offline.

Sometimes, an IIS Application Pool will crash and stop due to various fatal application errors, issues with the user the app pool is running under, bad configurations, or other random problems. It is possible to get it into a state where it wont start at all due to these type of problems.

It is a good best practice always to monitor that your IIS Application Pool is started. It runs as w3wp.exe. Most monitoring tools have a way to monitor IIS Application Pools. Our product, Retrace, monitors them by default.

One weird thing about app pools is they can be set to Started but may not actually be running as w3wp.exe if there is no traffic to your application. In these scenarios, w3wp.exe may not be running, but there is no actual problem. This is why you need to monitor it via IISs status and not just look for w3wp.exe to be running on your server.

Visualize Iis Service Requests End

Dynatrace understands your applications transactions from end-to-end. Service flow shows the actual execution of each individual service and service-request type. While Smartscape shows you your overall environment topology, service flow provides you with the view point of a single service or service-request type.

The screenshot shows what a web request of an IIS service triggers in the system and how each component contributes to the overall response time. As you can see, this perspective provides far more detail than Smartscape view. This degree of analysis enables you to understand the bigger complexities within your system.

Dynatrace service flow visualizes IIS service requests end-to-end.

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Iis App Pool Monitoring

Ensure The Availability Of Application Pools

If your IIS application pool crashes due to fatal application errors, bad configurations, or other problems, the application stops working. Its always a good practice to monitor the resourceCPU and memoryused by the application pools, along with its health status and availability, to keep it within admissible limits and avoid unnecessary shortages. By identifying application pools that consume a great deal of CPU and memory, you can optimize the performance by allotting supplementary resources if the pool is running, and deleting the pools which arent running.

Application Pool stats as shown on the Applications Managers dashboard

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Top 10 Key Metrics To Monitor For An Iis Server

Having looked at the architecture of Microsoft IIS, lets now turn our attention to what are the key metrics to monitor regarding a Microsoft IIS server. Clearly, as IIS runs as an application on a Windows operating system, it is essential to monitor all the key operating system parameters. CPU utilization, memory utilization, activity of each of the disk drives, usage of handles in the operating system, page file usage, etc., are just a few of the key metrics to be tracked at the OS layer. To ensure that IIS is working, it is important to monitor the status of the World Wide Web Publishing service.

#1 Monitor IIS Availability and Response Time: Sometimes, the service could be up, but the IIS server may not be responding to incoming requests. Synthetic monitoring is recommended to ensure that IIS is monitored at all times. Synthetic monitoring involves protocol emulation either HTTP, FTP or NTP requests are issued to IIS and the response is checked to ensure that the service is responding. The time taken for the response is compared with prior baselines to determine if IIS is performing up to expectation.

#2 Monitor the workload on your IIS server and individual websites: IIS response times could degrade because of excessive load on it. Therefore, it is important to track the workload of the IIS server how many requests/second is it processing?

Related Reading:

• Find out how to answer the question why is my web application is slow?

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What Is Iis Monitoring Tools

The Internet Information Services tools are the set of application or software that enables a user to monitor and analyze the performance of the web servers. The tuning of the performance via monitoring the server is a delicate part of web administration that can only be performed best with the help of the IIS monitoring tools.

The servers after tuning perform at an optimum level as per the contemporary system and volume of traffic. The varieties of tools that are included in the package are IIS access Logs, Event logs of Windows server and Performance monitors which altogether optimize the servers and find out the bottlenecks.

For a hassle free and issue less server maintenance and optimized performance IIS monitoring tools are very important and handy. The users can find out the bottlenecks of the processes and can be eradicated them once the sources are detected. The effortless monitoring and properly configured platforms makes the process of server handling very convenient.

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Aspnet Error Rate Counters

• .NET CLR Exceptions # of Exceps Thrown: This counter allows you track all .NET exceptions that are thrown even if they are handled and thrown away. A very high rate of exceptions can cause hidden performance problems.
• ASP.NET Applications Errors Unhandled During Execution/sec: The number of unhandled exceptions that may have impacted your users.
• ASP.NET Applications Errors Total/Sec: Number of errors during compilations, pre-processing and execution. This may catch some types of errors that other Exception counts dont include.

You should be able to monitor these Windows Performance Counters with most server monitoring solutions.

Note: Some Windows Performance Counters are difficult to monitor because of the process name or ID changes constantly. You may find it hard to monitor them in some server monitoring solutions due to this.

Iis Application Pool: Learn How To Use It And Profit

Was that all there is to know about IIS and its application pools? On the contrary: all that youve read is nothing but the tip of the iceberg. Now its up to you to consider studying and learning more. An interesting next step would be learning how to monitor IIS performance: it sort of acts as a sequence to the topic of this post.If you want to go a step further, you should start checking out tools at your disposal. For instance, take a look at Retrace, which is an application performance management system by Stackify.

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Comprehensive Microsoft Iis Performance Monitoring With Eg Enterprise

As youve read in this blog so far, there are hundreds of metrics to track regarding the performance of a Microsoft IIS Server. eG Enterprise greatly simplifies and automates monitoring of Microsoft IIS:

Figure 11: Comprehensive layer model of an IIS web server in eG Enterprise

• eG Enterprise agents have built in capability to collect all the KPIs regarding Microsoft IIS on an on-going basis. The profile of Microsoft IIS, built into the solution, dictates what metrics to collect and at what frequency.
• Baselines configured in the system indicate the expected range of each metric. eG Enterprise also auto-baselines key usage metrics, so if there is unusual activity or usage or queueing in any of the IIS components, eG Enterprise can proactively alert administrators to this situation.
• Rather than provide a ton of measurements on a dashboard, eG Enterprise groups metrics by functional layers, so it is very simple to understand which layers are performing well and which are not. For instance, is an IIS performance issue due to insufficient hardware/OS configuration, or due to errors in the application stack, or due to a memory leak in one of the application pools?
• Performance metrics collected by eG Enterprise can be analyzed to determine trends for post-mortem diagnosis of problems and for intelligent capacity planning.

Performance Counters For Iis And Net

Performance counters help you analyze and are the primary indicators of the performance data that applications, services, and drivers provide. Since the standard OS for IIS is Microsoft Windows, all of the metrics are available via Windows performance counters. Applications Managers IIS monitor from ManageEngine can be configured to collect these metrics, and thresholds of permissible range can be associated with them to receive notifications about violations and perform corrective actions automatically.

The performance counters that are vital to IIS monitoring are:

System: CPU and memoryWeb Service: Byte transfer and connection stats.NET applications: Errors and exceptions

A simple HTTP checking service and Windows Management Instrumentation should be enough to check the health and availability of your web applications. But with a perceptive APM tool like Applications Manager, you can achieve more by optimizing performance and preventing unnecessary downtime. It also comes with advanced analytic reports that enable you to perform historic analysis and anticipate future usage trends, which is all the more reason to implement Applications Manager for your APM solution. If youre new to Applications Manager, learn more and explore on your own with a 30-day free trial that enables you to start monitoring in less than 10 minutes. Or, take a guided tour by scheduling a personalized demo.

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Monitor Your Iis Server Performance

With Dynatrace you get deep-level visibility into each of your web server process groups, including dependent applications and running services. When problems are detected, the Dynatrace anomaly-detection engine correlates host and network metrics with web-server specific metrics, like worker processes, to identify the root causes.

Dynatrace shows you all relevant information in an interactive infographic. Meta information like application version, modules, and IIS app pool are included. See availability metrics and events like deployment changes and IIS restarts.

Memory Usage Of Each Application Pool

I Use IIS 7.5 and I have Some ASP.NET sites and Some Web Services in different Application pools. In current days the Memory of server is in high usage, So how I know each application pool used memory? Is there any way? any suggestion?

• Under the IIS section in the Features View, double-click the Worker Processes icon

Here you can see both the private bytes and virtual bytes usage of each running application pool.

More information can be found here:

• 8″Under IIS” threw me off. ngm means: In the main features section of the IIS manager window. You don’t select a site or an app domain, but the top-level server node then on the right there will be heaps of features you can select from.

Each app pool will be in its own w3wp.exe process.

Open task manager, then go to Details tab. Right-click on the columns, select “Select columns”. . Make sure “Command line” is selected.

Then sort by name, and look at your w3wp.exe instances, and compare memory usage. You can tell which app pool each one uses because the name will show up in the command line.

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