TABLE OF CONTENTS One of the major advantages of monitoring the site access activity logging is that the log file helps you to keep track of all the details when a particular request is sent to your IIS server. It provides you with who, when, where, and how contents are being accessed.
Site access details are vital to understanding the usage and health performance of your IIS server. Information that is logged includes a visitor s IP address, user account accessing the contents, timestamp of when requests were made, server status reply about the request, the requested resource location, the amount of bytes used in the request, and more. Table A.1 shows the types of IIS services and supported log formats.
| Type of Service | IIS | NCSA | ODBC | W3C Extended | Centralized Binary |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| FTP | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | No |
| Web | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| SMTP | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
| NNTP | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
| Note | It is recommended that you configure logs using the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) extended format. This is the most comprehensive log format in IIS and it allows you to customize different logging property fields. The queries shown in this Appendix are based on W3C extended format. |
Let s start with some basic information about the IIS site logging feature. By default, the World Wide Web service (w3svc) and Microsoft FTP service (msftpsvc) are configured with W3C extended format. However, not all fields are enabled.
