Your web application is throwing some sort of error or invalid response. Do you know how to troubleshoot IIS or ASP.NET errors on your servers? Luckily, Windows & ASP.NET provide several different logs where failed requests are logged.
You are probably familiar with normal IIS logs, but there are some other places to look if you are looking for more detailed error messages or can’t find anything in your IIS log files.
1. Standard IIS Logs
Standard IIS logs will include every single web request that flows through your IIS site. Via IIS Manager you can verify that your IIS logs are enabled and where they are being written to.
You should find your logs in folders that are named by your W3SVC site ID numbers.
By default each logged request in your IIS log will include several key fields including the URL, querystring, and error codes via the status, substatus and win32 status. These status codes can help identify the actual error in more detail.
#Fields: date time s-ip cs-method cs-uri-stem cs-uri-query s-port cs-username c-ip cs(User-Agent) cs(Referer) sc-status sc-substatus sc-win32-status time-taken
2016-09-13 21:45:10 ::1 GET /webapp2 - 80 - ::1 Mozilla/5.0 - 500 0 0 5502
2016-09-13 21:45:10 ::1 GET /favicon.ico - 80 - ::1 Mozilla/5.0 http:
The “sc-status” and “sc-substatus” fields are the standard HTTP status code of 200 for OK, 404, 500 for errors, etc.
The “sc-win32-status” can provide more details that you won’t know unless you lookup the code. They are basic Win32 error codes.
2. Can’t find your request in the IIS log? HTTPERR is your IIS error log
Every single web request should show in your IIS log. If it doesn’t, it is possible that the request never made it to IIS, or IIS wasn’t running. Also, be sure that your IIS logging is enabled.
Incoming requests to your server first route through HTTP.SYS before being handed to IIS. These type of errors get logged in HTTPERR. Common errors are 400 Bad Request, timeouts, 503 Service Unavailable and similar types of issues. The built in error messages and error codes from HTTP.SYS are usually very detailed.
Where are the HTTPERR error logs?
C:\Windows\System32\LogFiles\HTTPERR
3. Look for ASP.NET exceptions in Windows Event Viewer
By default ASP.NET will log unhandled 500 level exceptions to the Windows Application EventLog. This is handled by the ASP.NET Health Monitoring feature. You can control settings for it via system.web/healthMonitoring in your web.config file.
Very few people realize that the number of errors written to the Application EventLog is rate limited. So you may not find your error! By default it will only log the same type of error once a minute. You can also disable writing any errors to the Application EventLog.
Still can’t find your exception?
Depending on if you are using WebForms, MVC, Web API, WCF or other frameworks, you may have issues with ASP.NET not writing any errors at all to ASP.NET due to compatibility issues with the health monitoring feature.
4. Enable Failed Request Tracing for an advanced IIS error log
Failed request tracing (FRT) is probably one of the least used features in IIS. It provides robust IIS logging and works as a great IIS error log. FRT is enabled in IIS Manager and can be configured via rules for all requests, slow requests, or just certain response status codes.
The only problem with FRT is it is insanely detailed. It tracks every detail and every step of the IIS pipeline. You can spend a lot of time trying to decipher a single request.
