Once your site has been successfully deployed, it is important to monitor it on an ongoing basis.
The following personnel should be involved in managing your site:
You need to continuously measure reality (actual site use) against projections (the user profile you created during the development phase). A different user profile can potentially require you to change the entire deployment of the system. If a failure occurs, you should already have a plan (developed during the deployment phase) in place to resolve it.
You can use the same tools and the same phases of development that you used to generate the original plans to develop an outline for growth. You can use your test environment to perform scaling tests using real user profiles; replaying the IIS logs with the Microsoft Web Application Stress Tool is a great start.
Many of the tools you develop to manage your site can be used to plan your next release. These include usage profiles based on actual data, output logs from the Microsoft® Windows NT® Performance Monitor tool, and information from Usage Analysis reports.
To monitor performance, use the same tools we recommended for the deployment phase. Additional tools you might find helpful include Microsoft® Systems Management Server, Tivoli, Unicenter from Computer Associates, and HP Openview.
For information on resources, see the following topics: