Troubleshooting Intermittent Failures on Web Applications (ASP.NET)

Question

Got reports of a web app going down twice in three weeks. Need to do some root cause analysis. works fine after a reboot. I'm not really an expert in this field.

It is hosted on IIS and Windows 2003.

There is nothing interesting in the event viewer, and IIS logs just show lots of successful GET operations. There is nothing interesting in SQL logs on the remote SQL server it connects to.

I'm not sure how to decipher the IIS log. It just looks like a bunch of successful GET messages with no errors.

I don't think I can really get too much further with root cause analysis track down the cause of the issue?

Answer 1

Take a look at this, it might help you find the app shutdown cause.

Answer 2

Depending on your traffic, twice in three weeks doesn't sound like a lot. The root cause may relate to the fix- if you were able to bring it back up by restarting IIS, it could be a memory leak. If you had to restart the server, it could be a deeper problem.

Answer 3

The only thing you could try to get some real results is this excellent blog by Tess Ferrandez. I think that you will find crash lab very enlightening :)