IIS Logs

J

JPWilson

Weaksauce
Joined
Jun 26, 2007
Messages
70
I'm in the process of migrating our servers to a new host and have almost finished transferring the 150 sites we manage. In the process of shuffling things over, I noticed that we have logs for all of our sites dating back to 2006 and many of those sites have a daily log size of several MB each. I imagine our HDD space is taking quite a hit.

I was going to write a quick script to archive past logs at the start of each month but wanted to get a second opinion here -- how long before a site log can be completely deleted? Is there a general rule of thumb or practice regarding log files? Why isn't there an auto delete/archive feature built into IIS?

Writing a script and throwing it into a scheduled task is easy whichever route I go... I just figured I'd better ask the pros before I go and jack something up. For reference, we're running Windows Server 2008 x64 (IIS7).
 
When I clean up IIS log files I usually leave the past 2 weeks worth. Don't think it matters at all though, I do it just incase there is some issue going on that I am not aware of yet.
 
Yeah I had a feeling 4 years of logs was a bit overkill. While I can see the need to have them in case of spammers/hackers/lawsuit, I doubt we'd need anything farther back than 6 months. I've got another week before everything is fully migrated so hopefully more people chime in. Thanks!
 
we have every web log since we first put up a web server in 1998 IIS 4 on NT 4 server
 
Better question to ask is what does the business need?

Do they have any legal requirements to keep the logs?
Do they have any data mining purpose to keep the logs?

Does the IT/data storage team have any fixed written policy on the matter of log files and how long you keep them (becomes important if lawyers ever get involved with a problem).


Different companies/organizations have different requirements - you need to figure out what is reasonable for your particular business.
 
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