Excluding files from web logs
- by Ray
I originally tried this question on StackOverflow, but it was suggested that serverfault was a better choice. So, here it is...
Looking through my web logs, I see a lot of entries that don't interest me. Some of them are commonly used images, css files, and scripts, which I can easily exclude by un-checking the 'log visits' check box in IIS for the folder properties.
I would also like to exclude log entries for certain common requests which are not in their own folders. Mostly, 'favicon.ico'. 'scriptresource.axd', and 'webresource.axd'. These (especially scriptresource.axd) make up almost a third of a typical log file on my site.
So, the question is, how do I tell IIS not to log these requests? And is there any reason that this is a bad idea?
The purpose of doing this is to reduce the log file size and the amount of work the server has to do, to make the log file more manageable when I need to dig in to them for troubleshooting, and for my own curiosity. I realize that log file parsers can skip the junk, but I am interested in reducing the raw files, before parsing.
