---
title: "The value of web server monitoring | Grafana Labs"
description: "Learn why monitoring IIS web servers matters and how Grafana Cloud helps you detect issues before they affect users."
---

# The value of web server monitoring

Web servers are the front door to your applications. When IIS slows down or stops responding, users notice immediately. Consider the following:

- A spike in HTTP 500 errors might indicate a failed deployment, a database connection problem, or an exhausted application pool. Without monitoring, you rely on user complaints to discover problems.
- Worker process recycling can silently degrade performance. If application pools restart too frequently, in-flight requests are dropped and session state is lost.
- Connection queue saturation means your server is rejecting legitimate traffic. Capacity planning requires historical data that only monitoring can provide.

Every minute of web server downtime has a direct impact. If you run customer-facing applications, outages translate to lost revenue and eroded trust.

## Why monitor IIS with Grafana Cloud?

Grafana Cloud’s IIS integration provides an out-of-the-box monitoring solution designed for IIS web servers. After you deploy the integration, it immediately starts collecting the most relevant metrics from your IIS instances.

The integration collects metrics including:

- **Request throughput** — requests per second across all sites
- **Error rates** — HTTP 4xx and 5xx response codes
- **Active connections** — current client connections and connection attempts
- **Worker processes** — CPU and memory usage per application pool
- **Bandwidth** — bytes sent and received per site

The collected data populates pre-built dashboards and alerts that represent industry best practices for IIS monitoring.

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### More to explore

- [What is observability?](/docs/grafana-cloud/introduction/what-is-observability/)
- [Grafana Cloud integrations](/docs/grafana-cloud/monitor-infrastructure/integrations/)