There are some neat counters available in Windows Performance Monitor for showing some IIS (Internet Information Server) statistics. My three favorites are:

1. Current Anonymous Users: This counter shows the number of current anonymous HTTP connections. Since most web sites serve content to anonymous users, it’s the one that seems to make the most sense to me when trying to gauge current traffic / activity on the site.
2. Anonymous Users / Second: This counter shows the data above, but how many connections per second those site visitors are generating.
3. Maximum Anonymous Users: This counter just show the peak number of anonymous users that were connected at a single time. Sometimes it’s neat to see where the site activity peaked.

How do you see these? Here are the steps and screenshots:

First find the Performance Monitor by clicking the Start Menu then Administrative Tools then Performance Monitor:

Then click on Performance Monitor in the left-hand pane under Monitoring Tools. After that you are presented with the graph window and you can click the green plus icon to add counters to this window (play around and different counters – there is a LOT of really neat information available).

After clicking the green plus icon, you are presented with a huge list of counter groups. Within each of those groups are individual counters. There are a ton – you really do need to just play around and check out the options.

For web (IIS) counters though, look for the group named Web Service and click the plus sign next to it to expand and show the individual counters.

After you add the counters you’ll see them listed at the bottom of the graph window, along with the color of each counter so you can match them easily.

There you go. Play around and have some fun checking out what type of traffic is hitting your site and how well the server is performing.

Happy hosting!