TABLE OF CONTENTS IIS 6.0 is the latest version of the Internet Information Services (IIS) offered by Microsoft. It includes a variety of well-known services including Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP), File Transfer Protocol (FTP), Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), and Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP). Although each of these services handles its own site access activity logging, there are no built-in tools that are able to parse from these plain text log files in order to extract useful information.
With additional log sources such as the HTTP error log (HTTPERR) and URL filtering log (URLSCAN, if installed), it is a tedious task to analyze these different log sources and try to understand the activities taking place in the IIS server. This chapter will showcase the magic of Microsoft s Log parser tool in trying to make any system administrator s life easier with many creative parsing queries.
