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Microsoft IIS 4.0 Monitoring & Performance

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Mike Lubanski
mlubanski@hotmail.com

Introduction

With the massive proliferation of web servers in the enterprise, it is important to maintain a monitoring strategy for monitoring those web sites for downtime and other potential problems…

With the massive proliferation of web servers in the enterprise,
it is important to maintain a monitoring strategy for monitoring
those web sites for downtime and other potential problems. The
Internet is revolutionizing the way business is conducted and web
sites and web servers play a key role in that revolution. Companies
that use their web servers to conduct e-business (such as
Amazon.com, E*Trade.com, etc.) rely on their web servers as much as
they rely on any other machine that provides the information to
conduct business.

This reliance on web servers demands a monitoring and management
strategy for the companies’ key web servers. Microsoft’s Internet
Information Server 4.0 is one web server technology that is popular
in the business. This document will give an overview and some
specific details about how to monitor and manage a Microsoft IIS 4.0
web server.

Prerequisites and Assumptions

Several prerequisites and assumptions should be met in order to
proceed with the monitoring.

  1. The SNMP service must be installed and configured on each
    server. The SNMP trap destination must be configured to point to a
    network management console where traps can be viewed, sort or
    acted upon by the support organization.
  2. To track any disk performance monitors, be sure that disk
    monitoring is enabled by executing “diskperf -y” on the target
    machine.
  3. The IIS-specific counters should be installed on all IIS
    Servers. This is normally done through product installation.
  4. This document covers “what” to monitor, but does not describe
    “how” or “by what means.” Therefore, a monitoring or management
    tool (of your choice) to monitor and alert on the events of the
    IIS will be necessary if a more sophisticated solution is desired.
    This will allow for the coordination and collaboration of events
    in order to be more proactive and response to the events. Simply
    monitoring events without the need for automation can be achieved
    with built-in operating system or (such as Windows NT Performance
    Monitor counters).
  5. Some events state “Need Baseline.” This indicates that a
    baseline of normal activity is necessary to help determine what is
    above or below normal or what would be considered an error. For
    example, CPU utilization should be baselined to determine what is
    the normal utilization of the CPU. From this number, you can
    determine what is abnormal.

 Key

The key to the table is as follows:

Problem Description

– This column defines the problem or
error.

Method of Detection

– This column defines how the problem
or error can be detected. Most of the time the method of detection
will be an entry in the Windows NT Event Log or a SNMP trap that is
generated by the machine.

Recommended Action

– This column defines what to do when
the problem or error occurs. In order to turn “monitoring” efforts
into “management” efforts, the recommended actions should be
automated to occur when the problem occurs.

Monitoring Interval

– This column defines how often the
monitoring sample should take place. Most monitors need to scan the
system every 30 or 60 minutes, while others may need to scan every 5
minutes, such as a health check of a service.

Severity definition:

1 = High priority, notify immediately

2 = Medium priority, notify within 1 hour

3 = Low priority, notify within 24 hours.

Threshold

– This column defines the thresholds that need
to be monitored. For events, the threshold will always be one. Other
monitors such as cache hit ratio will have a specific
value.

 

Internet Information Server – Operations

This section details what services and processes need to be
monitored in order to keep the IIS web server operational and
available.

 

Problem Description

Method of Detection

Recommended Action

Monitoring Interval

Severity

Threshold

FTP service
unavailable.
Monitor the FTP
Publishing Service within the service control
manager.
Attempt to restart
service. If restart fails, reboot server.

15 min

1

1

IIS Admin Service
unavailable.
Monitor the IIS Admin
Service within the service control manager.
Attempt to restart
service. If restart fails, reboot server.

15 min

1

1

Cannot access web
page.
Monitor the World Wide
Web Publishing Service within the service control
manager.
Attempt to restart
service. If restart fails, reboot server.

15 min

1

1

Poor Web Server
performance
Monitor the Web
Service performance monitor object and the Bytes Total / sec
instance
A high total bytes /
sec can indicate a high amount of traffic on a web server.
This can indicate a need for load balancing efforts or more
web servers.

15 min

2

Need Baseline

Logged
errors
Monitor the
%systemroot%system32LogFilesW3Svc1 directory for log
files.
Depends on log
entry

30 min

2

1

 

 

Internet Information Server – Performance

Using a new tool that Microsoft is releasing called “Homer,” IIS
servers can be stress-tested. As stated on the Homer web page, “The
Microsoft Homer web stress tool is designed to realistically
simulate multiple browsers requesting pages from a web site. You can
use this tool to gather performance and stability information about
your web application. This tool simulates a large number of requests
with a relatively small number of client machines. The goal is to
create an environment that is as close to production as possible so
that you can find and eliminate problems in the web application
prior to deployment.” Homer can be accessed from http://homer.rte.microsoft.com/

When using Homer, you can watch the following Performance Monitor
counters to get an idea of where your performance bottlenecks may
arise:

  • Disk Faults
  • System: % Total processor time
  • Bandwidth usage
  • ASP Requests/Sec.
  • Web Service: Get Requests/sec
  • Web Service: Post Requests/sec

 

 

General Tips for Faster Performance (on Client side)

  • Send fewer and smaller images to clients
  • Use SSL only when necessary
  • Cache static data and slowly changing content. Use expiration
    dates on data when possible.
  • Use Cache control on Proxy servers

 

 

General Tips for Faster Performance (on Server side)

  • Use static content whenever possible
  • Use adequate hardware
  • Scale to multiple processors if possible.
  • Partition workload among numerous machines
  • Have a good connection to any backend databases
  • Use Round Robin DNS or Router Load Balancing (like Cisco’s
    Local Director)
  • Decide on ISAPI vs. ASP vs. CGI. ISAPI will give you the best
    performance, but is high in maintenance and troubleshooting.

 

 

Windows NT

This section will detail what items need to be monitored in the
underlying operating system to ensure it keep the web server running
and available.

 

Problem Description

Method of Detection

Recommended Action

Monitoring Interval

Severity

Threshold

Runaway
process
Monitor the CPU
utilization of the server
Check all of the
server services. Restart services that are down in proper
order. Verify what service is consuming CPU. Examine the top
20 processes consuming CPU.

10 Mins

1

>80% Sustained over 10 mins

Need

Baseline

 

 

Hardware & Network Management

This section will detail what to monitor and manage in the
low-level hardware and network interface card.

 

Problem Description

Method of Detection

Recommended Action

Monitoring Interval

Severity

Threshold

Hardware
errors
Monitor the internal
temperature of server
Check hardware for
errors

10 min.

1

Need Baseline

Hardware
errors
Monitor any critical
IDE or SCSI disk failures
Check hardware for
errors

10 min.

1

Need Baseline

Hardware
errors
Monitor NIC
failures
Check hardware for
errors

10 min.

1

Need Baseline

Hardware
errors
Monitor any fan
failures
Check hardware for
errors

10 min

1

Need Baseline

Hardware
errors
Monitor any
correctable memory errors
Check hardware for
errors

10 min.

1

Need Baseline

Network utilization
high
Monitor the total
bytes/second processed by the network interface
card.
Check and/or tune
performance of NIC card.

10 min.

1

Need Baseline

ICMP errors Monitor the receipt
time for ICMP packets
Check and/or tune
performance of NIC card.

10 min.

3

Need Baseline

ICMP
errors
Monitor the
level of unreachable destinations.
Check and/or
tune performance of NIC card.

15 min

3

Need Baseline

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