This is more or less an extension of an existing topic thread titled Monitoring IIS App Pools By Name. Also, this may have been covered in a previous post but I haven't seen these details steps any where else. The following instructions apply to SAM 5.2 but most likely will apply the same to SAM 5.5 and SAM 6.0.
In addition to monitoring Internet and Information Services (IIS) on your Windows servers using SolarWinds SAM, you can also monitor specific IIS App Pools by name. To do this, you need to create a brand new application template in SAM. Give the template a name, configure the polling interval, then add the "Process Monitor - WMI" component.
The process name will be "W3WP.EXE". W3WP.EXE is an IIS instance\process and every app pool on the IIS server will run in its own instance of w3wp.exe.
Type in the app pool's name in the Command Line Filter text box. An example is in the screenshot below.
Before continuing, use the "Set Test Node" to test out the component monitor. If the test fails, try modifying the command line filter using the following syntax then try again:
-ap "NameOfAppPool" -v
For almost every time I've needed to monitor an IIS app pool by name, especially when that app pool is running in IIS 7 (64-bit) or IIS 7.5 (64-bit), I've needed to type in the -ap "NameOfAppPool" -v syntax. When I've had to monitor an app pool running on IIS 6.0 in Windows Server 2003 32-bit I only had to type in the app pool name without the special syntax.
I hope this post helps others that are slightly confused why you can monitor some app pools correctly in SAM and not others.
- Joe
