Health model and KB round-ups
I have troubleshooting on the mind this week since we just released the IIS7 health model (you can check it out at http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/library/b19873a2-9f72-40c8-b73d-89f39cda62781033.mspx?mfr=true). When we talk about diagnostics, we talk a lot about the new diagnostic features like FREB in IIS7 -- Mike has blogged about these in depth at http://blogs.iis.net/mvolo/archive/2007/07/26/troubleshoot-iis7-errors-like-a-pro.aspx. What's neat about the health model is it provides information about every error message that you will encounter in IIS. Take, for example, error code 2269: http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/library/b19873a2-9f72-40c8-b73d-89f39cda62781033.mspx?mfr=true. It gives you specific steps to fix and verify the fix for error message "The worker process for app pool '%1', PID='%2', failed to initialize the http.sys communication when asked to start processing http requests and therefore will be considered ill by W3SVC and terminated. The data field contains the error number." Really useful information for free, phone-less troubleshooting. The health model might not have the final solution to every problem, but it is a great first step for troubleshooting any error.
We built the health model in close partnership with PSS and our documentation team. The process of building the health model is an interesting one. Saad Ladki, the Program Manager who shipped the health model, was explaining this to some folks today. Events are manifested to the OS as part of the development process. We pick up events from the manifest and categorize those events into entities. Then we add health state, what we call "resolvers" (how to solve the problem) and "verifiers" (how to verify the that the problem is solved). This information is reviewed by the product team (extensively) and finally posted online as the health model. The most important thing that we focus on in this process is to make sure that our content is as accurate and actionable as possible.
Along the same lines of troubleshooting, here's another good resource for you. Bernard, one of our IIS MVPs, keeps an interesting blog at http://msmvps.com/blogs/bernard/. On his blog, Bernard lists a monthly round-up of IIS Knowledge Base (KB) articles. A useful resource!