IISA will tell you
You're probably accustomed to seeing the
byline of my boss, Tim Daniels, on WebDev. Well, Tim has turned the reins over
to me, T.J. Harty,
Windows NT Magazine's Web Master. Each month I'll share my experiences
in Web development and management. So, please, let me know what you think.
Have you ever wondered how many users access your Web server at any
particular moment? I have. In July, we ran a treasure hunt on our site.
Participants surfed the Web to find treasure chests on several different Web
sites. Each treasure chest gave participants a magic word--a directory
name. After they found all twelve directory names, participants had the
universal resource locator (URL) that took them to the final entry form.
Within days after we started the treasure hunt, the Web server log file was
growing at an enormous rate. Now log-analyzing packages will tell you what was
happening earlier on your server, but they can't tell you what you really need
to know--what's happening now. So when MediaHouse sent me IIS Assistant (IISA),
I thought it was worth trying.
Among other pieces of information, IISA can tell who's on your server and
what they're doing. The funny thing is, I find this capability both good and
bad: The good part is you get to know how many users are on your machine before
you reboot; the bad part is you get to know how many users are on your machine
when you have to reboot.
Fast and Flexible
IISA is a statistical
package designed specifically for Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS).
IISA provides a wealth of information about your users and your server. And
whereas my dual Pentium 100 machine takes four to six hours to process my weekly
Web server logs, IISA gives me up-to-the-minute information.
IISA uses an Internet Server API (ISAPI) DLL to collect statistics live.
The client and server communicate through an extended Hypertext Transfer
Protocol (HTTP), so you can use IISA from the server, from your workstation on
the network, from home via Remote Access Service (RAS), or even from your hotel
room.
IISA's user-related monitoring features let you see the current number of
users on your Web server, what a particular user is doing while on your site,
which browsers your users are using, what sites they are coming from, and which
URLs they access the most.
New in version 2.0 is the ability to monitor each of these features on
virtual servers. IISA's server-related monitoring features let you monitor the
status of the services running on your Web server and set up monitors to watch
over the status of other crucial machines.
Installation of IISA server and client applications is a breeze. After you
extract the files and start setup.exe, the most difficult part is making sure
you type the correct security key for both. (I highly recommend cut and paste.)
During setup, IISA asks for two passwords. One lets the IISA client access
the IISA server for the statistics, and the other lets the IISA client perform
server administration. As advertised, setting up the server and having my IISA
client view live statistics took only 10 minutes.
Web Master Becomes Spymaster
Let's look
at the types of statistics you can view and collect with IISA. The Who's On
tab shows you the number of people actively accessing your server. If you expand
that option, you can see user IP addresses. Then, if you expand an individual IP
address, you can see how long the user has been on line, how many requests the
user has made, and what the user's last request was, as shown in Screen 1.
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