So we have been having some internal server errors that are showing up in our WebTrends logs. However, the WebTrends reports only tell me how many errors have happened and at what time. They don't tell me any useful info like what page threw the error and what the referrer to that page was, etc...

Does anyone here know of a tool that can provide more info about 500 errors on the web server from the logs? The logs are from IIS on a W2K server. I imagine the logs themselves provide more info than what WebTrends is telling me - or am I wrong?

Thanks for any help!

Nope, access logs typically don't tell you what went wrong. You need to dig into the error logs for that. The error logs are generally in the same directory as the access logs, but I don't know IIS well enough to tell you where to look exactly.

Does IIS put any of those errors in the operating system's event logs? Have you looked there?

If there is a way then I would be interested.

I have some ASP page that just dumps the properties of the error out to a text file. You just need to set it as the Custom Error page for 500.100 errors.

Thinking about it, it might be possible to append the W3 log file, but I suspect it would be locked by the IIS process. You might be able to get to it using an ISAPI filter, but that is a bit beyond me.

edit: Here's some example code for getting error properties from an ASP page. This is saved as something like 500.asp and set as the custom error page.

Response.Status="500 Server Error"
Response.Write("<h1>whoops we have an error!</h1>")
[......]
Set objError = Server.getLastError()
strNumber = objError.AspCode
strSource = objError.Category
strPage = objError.File
strDesc = objError.Description
strCode = Server.HTMLEncode(objError.Source)
strLine = ObjError.Line
strASPDesc = ObjError.ASPDescription

I usually log the Request.ServerVariables("HTTP_REFERER"), Request.QueryString and Now() so that it can be easily tied back to the log files if required.

Gareth

Ah of course!! Why didn't I think of that. Thanks Gareth... *Implementing custom 500 error page now*

Boy, what an elegant solution. I can't believe I didn't create a custom 500 page years ago!

Thx again.

Does that mean I should stop hitting F5?

Good stuff, I have found it very useful and do the same for 404's. I log all the sites on my servers to a single folder which I check every now and then. 404's do need a bit of filtering though - things like Office Shortcut bars attempt to call a web services DLL and you get people scanning for exploitable CGI's etc, and then you have favicon's robots.txt etc.

Gareth