Monitor with AppInsight for IIS
AppInsight for IIS is an AppInsight application that you can use to monitor your IIS environment to identify IIS server, website, and application pool performance issues. The dashboard provides ease of monitoring with at-a-glance performance metrics for sites and applications pools, updated through access to the IIS.
As sites and application pools change through the IIS Manager, data and connections update in the SolarWinds Platform Web Console. As you find and fix issues, stop or restart servers and pools as required.
You can add AppInsight for IIS automatically during Discovery or add it to nodes manually via the Node Details view. After it is applied to a node, AppInsight for IIS is considered an application and reports data to SAM through a set of component monitors.
To start using AppInsight for IIS, review the following topics:
- AppInsight for IIS requirements and permissions
- AppInsight For IIS and component-based licensing
- Assign AppInsight for IIS to nodes in SAM
When finished, see Alerts and reports for AppInsight for IIS.
Here are some tips for using AppInsight for IIS:
- Starting in SAM 2020.2.6, you can disable dynamic AppInsight for IIS components if a known issue in your environment (for example, a web server outage) will increase false-positive alerts and logs. You can also turn off components that aren't important for your organization, to reduce polling loads.
- For advanced managing of IIS sites, disable unused sites instead of deleting them. To reduce alert noise, disable any alerts associated with those disabled sites.
- Enable sites anytime you need them through the Site Details pages in AppInsight for IIS. This option and others are available in the Management widget per ISS server, site, and application pool.
- Available AppInsight for IIS reports include:
- IIS SSL Certificate Expiration Report
- Site Connections Report
- Site Log Size by File
- Site Size by File
To learn more about AppInsight for IIS, see:
- AppInsight for IIS template (SAM Application Monitor Template Reference)
- Deep Dive on using AppInsight Templates (webinar)
- IIS Web Server Monitoring: Best Practices (THWACK)
- IIS Web Server Monitoring Tool: AppInsight for IIS (SolarWinds YouTube video)
- Monitoring & Alerting on IIS Server Performance (THWACK)
- Monitoring Microsoft IIS (SolarWinds YouTube video)
- Troubleshoot AppInsight for IIS (SAM online help)
Use SolarWinds AppOptics to get advanced performance metrics from IIS nodes. See Integrate AppOptics monitoring with AppInsight for IIS nodes.
Use SolarWinds Web Performance Monitor (WPM) to visualize synthetic web transaction metrics in the context of application performance metrics on the WPM Transactions subview on Node Details and Application Details pages. You can also create dependencies between transactions and applications, as well as transaction and nodes. See this blog post in THWACK for details.
Navigate to the AppInsight for IIS Details view
Access AppInsight for IIS metrics through the All Applications widget in the SAM Summary page.
To access the AppInsight for IIS Details view:
- Click My Dashboards > Applications > SAM Summary.
- Locate the All Applications widget and expand the AppInsight for IIS tree by clicking [+].
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Click an IIS application to view it.
The Sites widget lists the sites (both front and backend) for the IIS server. Click a site to view more details such as response time, connections, and requests.
The Application Pools widget lists up to 5 instances of IIS application pools. You can use application pools to separate out applications from one another. If an issue occurs with an application, it may only affect other applications in the pool, not all applications in your environment.
Click a pool to view additional worker process details.
To view the Performance Counter Details view, click a performance monitor in any widget.