How to monitoring by powershell IIS Worker Processess?

Question

I would really appreciate your help. What should a powershell script look like to get all running IIS Worker Processes and perform an action (show alert) when the number of processes is greater than the value “x”. And is it correct to run it in “do{}while for constant monitoring?

Answer 1

Hi @Simon Shone,

You can try this method to monitor IIS application pool stop/crash and get email alert. Open Event Viewer -> Custom Views -> Server Roles -> Web Server (IIS). This is the log of the web server. The related event log file is saved at C:\Windows\System32\winevt\Logs\System.evtx. When an application pool stops, it creates an event ID 5186 record. You can select a record and choose to attach a task to this event, a wizard will guide you through the process, and then in action, you can send a mail alert.

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Best regards,

Yurong Dai

Answer 2

If you have some problem, I think that I would first configure the IIS app pool recycling options and have IIS periodically recycle the worker processes. Next, I would be talking to the site developers and get them to fix whatever is wrong with their code that is causing excess w3wp.exe processes.

Monitoring is easy, it all depends on your requirements, environment, etc.

One thing that I used to do was run an HTA on my desktop so that I could monitor my web servers during prime time when an outage would impact many users.

Here's one example using Powershell.

$servers = @('test10','webserver2')
$max = 3                                   # w3wp count limit
Add-Type -AssemblyName System.speech
$SpeechSynthesizer = New-Object –TypeName System.Speech.Synthesis.SpeechSynthesizer
$SpeechSynthesizer.SelectVoice("Microsoft Zira Desktop")
while ($true) {
    foreach ($server in $servers) {
        [array]$procs = Get-CimInstance win32_process -Filter "Name='w3wp.exe'"  -ComputerName $server
        "{0} - {1} - Count: {2}" -f (get-date), $server, $procs.count 
        If ($procs.count -gt $max) {        # how many? 
            $SpeechSynthesizer.Speak("Warning too many worker processes")   # or some other warning 
        }
    }    
    Start-Sleep -Seconds 60         # how long between tests 
}