If you have ever run an enterprise web site you have probably received a panicked call from a customer or from your Tier 1 monitoring team that your site was responding slowly or throwing 500 errors and that you needed to resolve this issue ASAP. Maybe you are rolling out a new application or software across your site and want to perform side by side analysis of servers to ensure their health.

Over the past year we have rolled out multiple pre-release versions of Windows Server 2008 / IIS 7.0 onto the www.microsoft.com site. During this process we have had to monitor the overall health of the site. Which included being able to quickly identify content/application that were not behaving well on a server, cluster of servers or across the entire site. When running an enterprise of IIS servers it is invaluable to understand the traffic patterns of your site and to have the tools to help identify problem areas. There are many tools in the wild to monitor the health of your enterprise, but I will show you how to use Logparser to harvest your IIS logs and pinpoint a site problem. The goal of this blog is to help you identify issues or anomalous traffic patterns on your IIS web site.