Introduction to Performance Counters for IIS Monitoring

IIS is a web server solution available for sharing information with users in the intranet, extranet, and even the internet. Ensuring that your IIS solution is performing well and offering a consistent response time is crucial to maintaining a consistent customer experience in the current digital landscape. In fact, if you don’t have a strategy for IIS performance monitoring, then you could end up with a problematic site, as well as unhappy users.

Lack of IIS performance at best leaves you with unhappy customers that you need to convince to trust you again. On the other hand, a lack of monitoring could also mean that people abandon your services entirely because they’re unpredictable.

Recommended Counters for IIS Performance Monitoring

One of the main reasons why companies choose to use IIS as a web server is that it comes with a lot of metrics available to track in the form of Windows Performance counters. There’s a wide variety of counters available, ranging all the way from .NET, to .ASP and beyond.

Here are just some of the most common performance counters that you might look at when you’re building your IIS monitoring strategy:

Process/System counters:

This includes things like your CPU percentage – the amount of server and CPU usage that your IIS solution consumes. You might also want to track things like the available memory that’s leftover for your IIS workload.

IIS Performance counters:

Once you’ve got the basic system counters out of the way, you can begin to look at deeper indications of performance like:

• Current connections (web service): identify what the normal value is for your website or app and use that as a benchmark.
• Web service in bytes sent per second: Track and identify the potential spikes in your app’s traffic.
• Web service in bytes received per second: Track other potential spikes in traffic from the other direction.

How Can You Simplify IIS Performance Monitoring?

IIS performance monitoring is relatively easy to do. However, the more counters and information that you want to keep track of, the harder it is for your IT team and administrators to keep a close eye on everything that’s happening within your stack. Because of that, it’s usually much easier to use an automated monitoring tool to track IIS performance, rather than trying to watch all of the parameters manually.

Not only can a performance monitoring solution simplify the process of watching over your IIS performance, but it can also come with a number of interesting benefits too. For instance, some monitoring solutions will allow administrators to set up instant or “real-time” notifications that inform them when something is wrong with the typical performance counters that they’re tracking. These real-time alerts make it easier to respond rapidly to problems with the IIS environment before they have a long-lasting negative impact on your application, your user’s experience, and the reputation of your brand. What’s more, the automated monitors can also track trends in performance issues, making it easier to spot where issues will occur in the future.

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