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monitoring IIS application pools

FormerMember

I have a few questions, mostly just best practices or recommendation questions.

I have (for example):

NPM 9.5.1 with APM

10 load-balanced web servers - Windows Server 2003, IIS6

5 web applications named as distinct application pools in IIS (apool1, apool2...)

I can successfully monitor the pools individually, so this isn't a bug or technical issue. Yay!

1. While I have 10 web servers, I don't always have all 5 applications sent to all 10 web servers at any given time. Often, apool1 is pretty busy so it gets sent across 5 servers. But sometimes apool2 is not so busy, so I drop it down to just 2 web servers. This means if I monitor apool1 and apool2 across all 10 web servers, I'm going to get alerts from the servers that aren't actively hosting those apps. This is fairly dynamic and I do change them pretty often. Any suggestions? In my case, due to the way I manage my apps across the web servers, so far I permanently have yellow colors across all my web servers because at least one apool monitor is not applicable to that server at the present time.

2. My next question is the same setup, but what do I do at 2am when my web servers are not getting much traffic and the application pools naturally recycle or shut off. I don't really care about the up/down of these individual pools, but I do care about their performance or lackthereof historically, i.e. I want to know how heavy they run when they are running. Is there a way I can turn off the up/down monitoring so I don't see unnecessary red or yellow every night? Let's pretend that any true outages where an application pool screws up and crashes is covered with event log monitoring and other uptime monitoring of the web site itself.

3. More generically, does anyone else have any insight on monitoring IIS app pools like this? Should I have individual application monitors in the APM for each pool, or one aggregate application monitor with 5 components? Or maybe 6 components and include an overall w3wp.exe monitor so I get an idea of the total load?

This may end up diving deeply into the best way to organize my app monitors in the APM, and that's ok. I'm pretty flexible!

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Accepted answers

macnugetz

Akeap, could you please open a support ticket and reference this thwack thread?

Thanks!

Craig

All comments

gbutler

I'm wondering if you could play with the alert status for the APM.... define "critical" as an action that causes things to go red.... define "down" as the process is just not around and therefore ignore...

The monitor will trip when the app is no longer present but the status is not the same.

FormerMember

I'm not sure I want to play too much with those, as I still do have plenty other applications and components that I want to monitor normally.

But I think you're in the right area. I'm suspecting I'll have to exclude/supress alerts for those apps/components in my normal alerts, and make special ones that key off a paticular name (like Applications_Pools) that simply don't do anything when these trigger...

Sadly, this does still mean my status dashboards will be sprinkled with reds and yellows still... If I find no other solutions, I wonder if that would make an ok feature request: to be able to supress status changes (or force it to stay green) for specific applications or components per node in the APM but still gather statistics as normal. In my mind, there is value in seeing the up/down and resource utilization graphs of applications, even if I don't want to be nagged about the status changes.

t0ta11ed74

I realize this post is old but I'm still trying to find the best way to monitor an app pool the way neon has described. Is the best/right solution to modify alerts to behave differently when the status of this app pool changes? Will that still gather stats?

Akeap

I hope someone can fix this as I have a couple of specific Application pools that are up and down all the time and this reports as outages and emails the web team... becoming a real pain...

With the a Exchage showing up and down all the time in APM I getting no real information out of Orion solution...

aLTeReGo

AppInsight for IIS, which is part of the SAM 6.2 beta, includes native Application Pool monitoring.

Sites and Pools.png