What is good/free software for monitoring IIS in Windows Vista?

Question

I always forget to check what's going on in IIS on our webservers, and am wondering: is there some stupid applet or something that always runs locally that I can click on to check event logs and IIS logs on a remote machine?

Mark

Answer 1

You can set up samurize to follow the output of the logging on the local and remote machines but it requires some setup.

You can use a remote shell utility such as OpenSSH to connect to remote machines securely.

Answer 2

One at a time. Compmgmt.msc -> connect to another computer.

But one at a time is boring. Monitoring dozens of machines? I've been using logparser from MS for my log monitoring needs. I run a query that dumps errors and warnings to a csv file a few times a day.

So far, I've only used it to aggregate event logs across the dozen servers in our QA environment, but it appears to take many forms on log input, including IIS. A pseudo log file query (don't have samples with me)

logparser "Select [eventtype], [message] into output.csv FROM \\server1\system, \\server2\system" -i EVT

This shows: You can aggregate multiple servers. You tell it the input format - it supports a dozen log types. You can dump it into a csv file. It looks sort of like SQL. This article in security focus has an IIS log sample.

I'm not an applet type of guy, so I haven't though much about desktop widgets to do this.