IIS is very popular in part because it provides such a compact service with lots of features and configurations. Most enterprises that use Windows Server editions are hosting their websites using IIS. When hosting critical applications, many companies use monitoring software to keep their system administrators informed about the overall behavior of their systems. Such software provides configurable alerts for performance counters, services and applications. We will talk about how to monitor IIS, what the most important performance counters are, and what services should be monitored when talking about Internet Information services.

In this Power Admin video, learn how to monitor a webpage / website. Monitor one or many pages on a web site. Checks for positive cases (text that must be found), negative cases (alerts if error text found) and if the page has changed at all. Response times are checked and recorded, and reports can be generated to understand trends. The Web Page Monitor lets you define one or more web pages or web resources that should be checked. You can check return codes, data size, content on the page and/or changes in content size.

Learn how to add a Service Monitor to your monitored server in PA Server Monitor. The Service Monitor watches the same system services that can be seen from the Administrator Tools Services applet (services.msc). If a service is not running, actions are fired (which could notify you and/or restart the service for example). The Restart Service action is typically attached to this monitor.

PA Server Monitor can use rule-based automatic monitor configuration, which makes configuring monitors for your environment almost effortless. The Dynamic Server List monitors are setup to detect specific server types. In addition, they ignore any servers that are tagged as being blocked from Automatic Configuration (more on that below). The Windows Server rule which will be applied to all computers that are marked as being Windows is shown below.