Professional Microsoft IIS 8

Chapter 22

Monitoring and Performance Tuning

What's in this chapter?

• Server Manager
• Task Manager
• Resource Monitor
• Performance Monitor
• What to monitor
• Operating system optimizations
• IIS service optimizations
• Website optimizations

After covering operations frameworks and processes in the previous chapter, it's time to talk about the changes you can make to improve performance and ensure the uptime of your web service. We can't cover it here, but the major performance factors are managed at an architectural level, where decisions are made about which roles each server will fill and how they may or may not be load balanced. Chapter 16, “IIS Scalability I: Building an IIS Web Farm,” and Chapter 17, “IIS Scalability II: Load Balancing and ARR,” touch on these decisions. Additionally, IT Service Management (ITSM) is a popular body of knowledge that emphasizes end users when prescribing approaches to ensuring that IT systems behave as designed. Monitoring and tuning are both core to that philosophy. For a user-centric approach and toolset, use your favorite search engine to learn more about ITSM.

It doesn't take much research to see that, from an ITSM perspective, monitoring is about more than just troubleshooting problems with data. Effective monitoring can get you ahead of a problem, detecting an impending outage or performance issue before it impacts your end users. Having it in place obviously doesn't preclude problems, but when problems occur, your mean time to resolution will be ...