Recently, I installed MS Office 2010 RTM and along with all the “cool” features, I got something which took me by surprise. The Local Disk (Q). I wasn’t really sure if I got affected by some kind of virus. Take a look at my drives… I tried, “Ejecting” this drive but couldn’t. I tried getting into this drive and all I could get was “Access Denied”. Disk Management utility didn’t even talk about this Q Drive. After a little research found that this was because of Application Virtualization ... [More]

Do you notice anything special in the list below? If you have been working with Perfmon enough, you will notice that the Process Counters are missing in the list below. Download a utility called Extensible Counter List from this link…. and run it. Select PerfProc and ensure that Performance Counters Enabled is checked. If it is not checked, check it. If you are not getting this checkbox at all, run this tool as an Administrator and you should be able to see it. Restart Perfmon after clo... [More]

This post is a continuation of this article. Scenario 9:Find out total count of different errors in your HTTP Error Log file on any IIS Server Answer: Logparser "select sc-status, s-reason, cs-uri, count(*) from 'FolderName\*.log' to 'FolderName\Total.csv' Group by s-reason, sc-status, cs-uri" -o:CSV -i:HTTPERR If you want to just see the different types of errors coming up… use the following… Logparser "select s-reason, count(*) from 'FolderName\*.log' to 'FolderName\Total.c... [More]

In part 1 of this series, I provided the BaseLine counter set for Windows 2k3. To close this loop for Win 2008, I am providing one more set of baseline counters for IIS. Download the following template and extract the XML file - IIS-BaseLine-Win-2k8.zip.     Start –> Run –> Perfmon     Right click on Data Collector Sets –> User Defined –> Select New –> Data Collector Set     Give a name, and ensure Create from a te... [More]

In the last couple of posts you’ve seen collection and manual analysis of Performance data. In this post let’s automate the analysis using one of the really fantastic tools called PAL – Performance Analysis of Logs. Download it from CodePlex. Ensure that you have installed all the pre-requisites… 1. Log Parser 2.2 Log parser is a powerful, versatile tool that provides universal query access to text-based data such as log files, XML files and CSV files, as well as key data sources on the Win... [More]

In my previous post, I have shown the configuration of perfmon counters. Let’s talk about how to analyze it now. Before you do anything else, read the following articles… IIS 6 Performance Counters Suggested Performance Counters to Watch (IIS 6.0) ASP.NET Performance Counters I know it is a lot of stuff to go through, but then to master drawing, you must learn about the brushes! To manually monitor some counters, you must add the .blg file that got created earlier when you stopped... [More]

If you consider troubleshooting as an art, Perfmon will be one of the brushes – almost like sable. If you master it well, you can not only tell a lot about your server’s performance, you will also be able to take a lot of actions pro-actively even before anything breaks down. In this post, let me quickly show how you can create various counters and set it up on your IIS/SharePoint Servers.     Click Start –> Run –> Perfmon (Click Ok)     Right click... [More]

Today one of my colleague came across a WebDAV issue where a customer was getting the error “Error: Cannot add duplicate collection entry of type 'add' with combined key attributes 'users, roles, path' respectively set to '*, , *'” when he would try to open WebDAV Authoring Rules feature in IIS 7. The error message clearly states that we have duplicate entry in the applicationHost.config file. <webdav> <authoringRules> <add users="*" path="*&quo... [More]

Recently I came across an issue where a customer was unable to reinstall IIS 7 on Windows Server 2008. The issue started happening after they upgraded some vendor CGI application that was hosted on IIS. I used the CBS.log which is located at C:\Windows\Logs\CBS folder. Since IIS 7 is all modularized every component you select in IIS will install and uninstall module wise. You will see the CBS logfile has detailed information on what is the new component that is about to be installed and the ... [More]

This post is a bit off the track to my usual IIS topics. I am not a big fan of desktop search software's and I don’t like unwanted software's hogging on my memory or CPU. I have heard a lot of good things about this Instant Search in Outlook and though I will go ahead and enable it. Today when searching for some text in my Microsoft Outlook 2010 beta, I saw “Click here to enable Instant Search”. Clicked on the notification bar and that popped out a message Looks li... [More]