Monitoring Perfmormance

Monitoring Performance Internet server administrators monitor their servers in order to make informed decisions concerning the daily operations of their sites. In addition to tracking error and status information, administrators of large or heavily accessed servers tune and configure them to match network capacities and traffic. Microsoft recognizes that there are numerous implementations of performance indicators and provides two of the most commmon with Internet Information Server: Windows NT Performance Monitor counters and SNMP-accessible counters described by MIBs. For each implementation, the software exposes a rich set of counters to allow for effective monitoring and analysis.

Perfmon
Windows NT Server includes the Performance Monitor (perfmon) tool so that administrators can view and analyze the performance of Windows NT Server operation. In addition to real-time charts of service activity, Performance Monitor provides a way to log and replay these statistics (click to try this), view them as a report, or send alerts if metrics exceed or fall below preset thresholds.

In addition to the standard Windows NT-defined counters available through the Performance Monitor, Internet Information Server provides an extensive collection of HTTP, FTP, and Gopher-specific counters which allow for close management and precise tuning.

If you have access to the computer on which you're running Internet Information Server, then you can try some predefined Performance Monitor chart, log, report, and alert settings Microsoft uses to manage its Internet Information Servers.

SNMP
SNMP is also a common monitoring solution for application servers. Because SNMP agents and management stations have been implemented on a wide variety of client and server platforms, SNMP monitoring is frequently used in large, heterogeneous networks. Internet Information Server includes an SNMP agent for reporting performance data to an SNMP management station. Every counter available through the Performance Monitor is also available and described by the MIB provided by the Microsoft Internet Information Server SNMP agent. SNMP MIB files are on the Microsoft Internet Information Server compact disc in the \Sdk directory.