Monitoring web applications is essential for the smooth running of any web based operation. Internet Information Services (IIS) from Microsoft is an established web server in the market place and there are many effective ways to setup IIS Monitoring.

What is IIS Monitoring and how can it benefit the bottom line in terms of profitability?

IIS monitoring is a way to continually check the health of an IIS based application or web site. This process is typically automated and administrators or site owners are only notified in the event of an error or fatal crash.

Alongside this automated approach administrators are also provided with “heart beat” feedback, which tells the admin that the site or application is performing within specifications. In technical terms, this is often called “ping monitoring”.

When considering web applications, it is typically not a question of “if” an application error will occur, it is more a question of “when”.

Effective IIS monitoring provides early detection should something go wrong. Clearly, the ability to detect fatal errors as soon as they occur is invaluable. It is absolutely critical for online merchants to have very little downtime, especially in a global economy, where consumers are shopping around the clock. Imagine the frustration of waking up on a Monday morning, only to find your entire shopping cart has been down since Friday evening. Clearly this kind of scenario can be devastating to not only sales, but online trust and credibility with consumers.

How is IIS Monitoring setup? This really depends on your hosting environment, and the specific monitoring software in question. It is crucial to understand that IIS as a web server resides inside an operating system (typically Windows 2003 Server, Windows 2008 Server / R2) because of this the IIS monitoring application cannot be run on the same server as the web host. It would be a colossal error in judgment to attempt to cut costs by combining the two operations.

Server operating systems have improved in reliability over the years, however they are not infallible. Although the term “IIS monitoring” implies that you are checking the reliability of an IIS site, for monitoring to be effective we need to consider the bigger picture, this being IIS, the server it runs on, as well as any connected systems we have in our application. For example the email server might be just as crucial to our operation as the IIS web application.

For those who are considering purchasing IIS monitoring, ensure that you cover your bases, a great deal of web servers are still running IIS 6. Visit Sitespector.com for more information – http://blog.sitespector.com/iis_monitoring.php (free information).