IIS Logs cleanup

Question

We have IIS in exchange 2019 server and logs are stored in the C:\inetpub\logs\LogFiles\W3SV2, but we are cleaning up the logs every 9 month as it is utilizing the more space, while talking to my senior I came to know that IIS itself had settings for rotating logs and delete older once.

Can anyone conform is that setting still exist, if not what is the effective way to do that without and third-party tool.

Thanks

Answer 1

Hello Nandan NK,

Thank you for posting in Q&A forum.

Depending on your needs, you can refer to the following links first.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/iis/manage/provisioning-and-managing-iis/managing-iis-log-file-storage

I hope the information above is helpful.

Best regards

Zunhui

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Answer 2

IIS has a setting to limit the number of failed request tracing log files, but not the primary HTTP request log files.

A simple solution as that link indicates is to use the task scheduler to run a script to purge the old files. The sample script is written in VB script which Microsoft has announced is effectively end-of-life, so a better choice is Powershell.

A purge script is trivial.

Start-Transcript -Path "C:\Scripts\Logs\IIS-Log-File-Purge.log"   # use your file/folder name
$DaysToKeep = 200                                                 # how many days to keep  
$path = "C:\inetpub\logs"                                         # path to your log files 
$AllFiles = Get-ChildItem -Path $path -Recurse -Filter *.log
"Total log file count is {0}" -f $AllFiles.count  
$PurgeFiles = $AllFiles | Where-Object -Property lastwritetime -LT (get-date).AddDays(($DaysToKeep * -1))
"Selected for delete is {0}" -f $PurgeFiles.count  
$PurgeFiles
$PurgeFiles | Remove-Item -WhatIf           # remove -whatif after testing to actually delete the files 
Stop-Transcript

Save that as a .ps1 file somewhere and define a task to run it. You probably only need to run it once a week. Use the SYSTEM account as the account that the task executes as.