MY IIS logs are taking up a lot of space and I don't know what to do with them. If Google Analytics is meeting all of my needs can I just delete all my IIS logs and turn off the daily creation of them?
I've spent the past hour hour or so understand what IIS logs are and what they do. I've seen that a lot of people delete them after "x" number of days, or they archive and delete? Do I need to archive and delete them? I didn't even know they existed until today, so needless to say I'm not really using them, so I'm hoping I can just delete them this once and turn off future creations of them?
Can you let me know if this is a good idea?
You might want to to archive them just in case. For example, if something odd happens it is always useful to have the logs.
If you are just monitoring stats Google analytics does not require them.
First, remember that web server logs can tell you lots of things GA can't. For example, they can easily tell you who downloaded which non-html files. Or if you have a nasty string of HTTP 500 errors that prevent pages from being rendered.
All that said, there is no technical reason why one would need to keep them. We actually disable IIS logging on some internal servers entirely so as not to have to clean up after it.
Related
I recently launched a fantasy football online game for the English premier league called Myfpl11.com and I want to know what server should I choose if I am expecting 20k visits a day. My visits are going up and I want the site to keep performing smoothly. Please help.
This is probably the wrong area of StackExchange to ask this sort of question. However ...
The first thing you should do is get prepared to scale horizontally instead of vertically. If you keep growing you will soon grow out of any single server that you purchase.
Instead, what you need to do is start looking at ways to modify your website to be able to work over multiple systems. If you're experiencing load issues on the server you currently have, spin up another one of the exact same instance and move the database to that server, so you will then have two -- one dedicated to the database (which will really help it do its job) and one dedicated to serving traffic.
From there look at how you can scale in to multiple web processes, databases and add caching layers.
You can add cloudflare.com as your DNS service which will help you out by better caching your assets, but most importantly they will deliver a technical issues page to your users if your site does fall over at any stage. This is really helpful for saving face, because they will get an actual page with a message instead of a continually loading white-page.
Look at using services like digitalocean.com or linode.com (both very affordable and great staff) where you can easily add/remove resources as you need them.
note: there are few similar questions already asked here - but they are from 2009. May be something has changed since then.
I'm responsible for a bunch of websites hosted on different servers. I do not do any log analysis right now, but I would like to change this. First question - what is the best tool to view ISSUES with the website based on IIS logs (i.e. 404, 500 responses, long page processing, etc)? Ideally with grouping/sorting options? I do not want to spend a lot of time on this, I just want to periodically check if all is good with the website.
Second question (and I know most likely i'm asking for too much) - but is there any way to expose processed logs to web? So I can review things mentioned above without RPDing into the server?
Ideally I'm looking for a free/open source solution, but I'm ready to pay for a good software as well (but not a lot of $$).
Thank you.
You can take a look at our log monitoring solution EventSentry, which can monitor text-based logs like IIS logs. We have standard templates setup for IIS, and we can consolidate the logs in a database with web-access, so that you can review the logs without using RDP.
It's a pretty flexible solution that allows you to pick the fields you are interested in, and ignore the ones you are not - and thus save space in your database.
You can also setup real-time alerts, so that you can get an email when a critical error is encountered in a log file, like a 500 error.
http://www.eventsentry.com/features/log-file-monitoring
Finally, you can also plug-in command line tools which can verify that a given web page is accessible, or get alerted when it changes: http://www.eventsentry.com/features/application-monitoring.
I'm biased of course, but I would say that our solution is pretty affordable. Since it offers additional functionality as well, such as service monitoring (to monitor your IIS services) and event log monitoring (IIS does log critical messages to the event log), you can setup comprehensive monitoring with a single product.
I'd look into #LuckyLuke solution (or similar) - classic "build vs buy" decision. Based on your post, this isn't going to be your "full time" job so IMHO its best to leave it to those who do...
I don't know what "legacy" answers you are referring to, but if you want to tinker you can use Microsoft's own log parser, and depending on how far you want to go with it, you can use it (COM dll) to write your "admin web pages" in .Net/ASP.Net and host it in each of your servers....
If you're very specific about the errors you just want to be alerted about, another "hacky" way would be to provide your own custom error pages (either the default IIS error pages, or configure your Asp.Net apps to use specific error pages).
Files get automatically deleted from hosting account.
How do i go about finding if its a virus on hosting or if someone with malicious intentions has hacked our hosting.
How do i go about finding cause for this situation.
Thanks
your question is far too general... basically this is a job for a foresic/security analyst... which would in turn need adminitrative (and usually physical) access to the machine...
What you can do:
Check whether there are any accounts that don't belong there
Check for beckground processes like cron/scheduler etc.
Check for viruses/rootkits etc.
This might yield nothing since for a real check you need to boot from a medium which is 100% virus-free
Change ALL passwords to new and very secure ones
Check all logs
I need to log the hits on a sub-domain in Windows IIS 6.0 without designating them as separate websites in the IIS Manager. I have been told this is not possible. How can I write my own script to do this?
I'm afraid google analytics is not an option due to the setup, I just need access (i'm guessing) to the file request event and its properties.
Wyatt Barnette - I've thought of this! But how do I set those properties for it to collect them all? I'm writing my own log parsing software, as I need specific things, I just need the server to generate the logs for me to parse!
Have you considered using Google Analytics across all your sites? I know that this is not true logging...but sometimes addressing simple problems with simple solutions is easier! Log parsing seems to be slowly fading away...
What you should be able to do is have your stats tracking package look at multiple IIS websites as a single site.
If your logging package can't handle this, check out the IIS log parsing tool. That should at least take care of the more onerous part of the task (actually making sense of the logfiles). From there it is a pretty straightforward reporting operation.
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I have been looking at the "_layouts/SpUsageSite.aspx" logs for my site, but they are giving erroneous results (eg 0 unique visitors when I know at least I have been on the site)
What is the best way to see these logs in a better way than the ootb functionality?
Did you enable the usage processing and the usage logging for the site in question?
You can enable them in you central admin under:
Operations -> Usage analysis processing
It may also be that the processing is limited to a speciffic timespan
I have come across a bug with the Usage analysis processing to do with UTC date conversion which resulted in the processed numbers being erroneous. This is apparently fixed in SP2, but we have not been able to implement this quite yet.
The alternative is a bit onerous as you need to copy the usage logs from each front end server to a location and configure the log parser to store the information in a data base.
Serge van den Oever steps through this quite well here.
I don't really recommend this as a regular process as it takes a lot of effort, but it does give you a huge amount of information for when you wish to take a detailed look at usage on a particular point of your SharePoint farm.
Ideally we would have a solution to parse the logs automagically using the log parser utility and provide that information in SSRS reports.
We patched to sp2 and it all started working again like magic.