Monitoring is a critical component for any
application or system. Architecting, designing, and testing an
application or system usually get the most attention. When all the
planning, testing, and tweaking have been completed, however, what is
the most important and critical part of the system? The answer is
rollout—yes, rollout is the most important step in this process, and it
can be the most scary and exciting part of any project.
Monitoring goes along
with rollout. Any application or system that can’t be monitored most
likely won’t make it in production very long or is not a critical piece.
Time and resources (both system and people) are scarce.
Microsoft has made
enhancements in performance monitoring. This section is not intended to
completely instruct you on all the tools and features but rather to
provide you with an introduction to each of them, as well as to give
pointers on how and when to use them.
The monitoring of a
system is only as good as the tools available. Various tools can help
you along the way to monitor, stress test, and tweak your application or
system. The following tools are available for monitoring, and we will
look at each one of them in turn in this section:
Web Capacity Analysis Tool (WCAT)
Reliability and Performance Monitor
Failed Request Tracing (FRT), also known as FREB
Event Viewer
System Center Operations Manager
WCAT
The Web Capacity Analysis
Tool (WCAT) is a critical tool for testing your applications and
systems. It has been designed to simulate workload scenarios. WCAT
enables you to determine the best configuration for your application and
system. The IIS team and NT Performance team use this tool to conduct
internal performance and scalability testing of IIS and ASP.NET. You can
download WCAT from http://iis.net/downloads.
Reliability And Performance Monitor
Windows Server 2008
introduces an expanded performance monitor named Reliability and
Performance Monitor. It’s the utility knife for administrators when
measuring performance for most anything. Windows Server 2008 and IIS 7.0
take advantage of this new tool. Figure 1
shows a picture of the Reliability and Performance Monitor. The four
major perfmon counter categories are displayed: CPU, Disk, Memory, and
Network.
FRT
One
of the core features of IIS 7.0 is the diagnostics. Known as FREB in
the early beta days, Failed Request Tracing (FRT) is new to IIS 7.0. It
will be your primary tool for tracking down and diagnosing issues.
Event Viewer
You may wonder why Event
Viewer is mentioned, but Event Viewer contains good information,
including information about any errors that may occur. Depending on your
audit settings, the amount of information provided by Event Viewer can
vary, but it is a great place to start when you are troubleshooting.
System Center Operations Manager 2007
System Center
Operations Manager 2007 is usually deployed in enterprise environments.
It is part of an overall monitoring and systems management suite of
tools. Microsoft has management packs that plug into Operations Manager
2007. For more information about this tool, go to http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/opsmgr/default.mspx.
