Centralized Binary Logging

With centralized binary logging, all web sites on a server write their logs to a single log file. If a large number of web sites are hosted on a server, thousands of log files can take up valuable server resources. Central logging uses a single binary file to log data, instead of a text file, which can result in performance benefits on your server.

Centralized binary logging is a server property, so when you enable it, it applies to all sites on that server. In fact, you can’t even configure logging on individual sites after centralized binary logging is set up.

Setting Up Centralized Binary Logging

The easiest way to set up centralized binary logging is to use the adsutil.vbs script, which is located in Inetpub\AdminScripts.

1. Open a command prompt.

2. Navigate to the C:\Inetpub\AdminScripts directory (by default, it’s on C. Your installation may vary).

3. Type in cscript.exe adsutil.vbs set w3svc/centralbinarylogingenabled true.

4. Press ENTER.

5. Open the Control Panel by clicking on Start | Control Panel | Services.

6. Stop and start the World Wide Publishing Service from the Services control panel.

After you’ve restarted the WWW service, binary logging will be active. The log file has an .ibl extension. Because the log is in binary format, opening it with Notepad won’t help much. You’ll be able to open the file, but it will be gibberish and won’t be in plain text. You can extract data from the file using the parsing tool for centralized binary logging. This tool is located in the IIS 6 Resource Kit. (It probably won’t be long before third-party web reporting tools have support for binary logging as well.)