Configure, secure, monitor, and troubleshoot Internet Information Services on Windows Server — from application pool management and SSL binding to performance tuning and production incident diagnosis.
IIS Administrators own the web hosting layer on Windows environments. They install, configure, and maintain IIS for hosting .NET applications, manage SSL certificates, diagnose HTTP failures, and enforce security hardening across Windows Server infrastructure.
IIS Administrators are critical in enterprises running .NET web applications on Windows Server, financial and healthcare organizations with on-premise hosting requirements, and hybrid teams bridging legacy infrastructure with cloud deployment practices.
The role often expands into broader Windows Server administration and cloud migration work as organizations move workloads to Azure App Service and Azure Kubernetes Service.
Start with Windows and IIS fundamentals, build automation and cloud skills, then add monitoring and observability for production support.
The foundation of this role. Windows Server architecture, NTFS, services, IIS sites, application pools, bindings, SSL, authentication, logging, and production troubleshooting for 500 errors and app pool crashes.
Automate IIS configuration, manage application pools, deploy certificates, query Event Logs, and write repeatable maintenance scripts — all from the command line or scheduled tasks.
Understand Linux fundamentals so you can work in mixed environments, compare web server configurations with Nginx/Apache, and troubleshoot cross-platform integrations effectively.
Learn Azure fundamentals: subscriptions, resource groups, IAM, and portal navigation. Essential context for understanding how on-premise IIS workloads map to Azure App Service and hybrid hosting scenarios.
Master Azure VMs, App Services, and Azure Load Balancer — the cloud equivalents of your on-premise IIS stack. Understand how to migrate and run IIS workloads in Azure.
Learn how .NET applications are containerized with Windows containers and deployed via Docker. Understand how IIS-hosted apps transition to container-based deployments in modern infrastructure.
Forward IIS access logs, Windows Event Logs, and HTTPERR logs to Splunk. Write SPL queries to detect error spikes, identify slow requests, and build dashboards for web application health.
Monitor .NET applications hosted on IIS with Dynatrace OneAgent. Use APM traces, service flow maps, and Davis AI to diagnose memory leaks, slow transactions, and application errors.
Expose Windows Exporter metrics and build Grafana dashboards for IIS worker process CPU, memory, request queue depth, and error rates — enabling proactive capacity management.
Understand how deployment pipelines push code to IIS via Azure DevOps. Configure Web Deploy targets, manage deployment slots, and participate in release engineering decisions that affect your IIS hosts.
Application is returning HTTP 500 errors after a deployment. Check IIS Failed Request Tracing logs to identify the failing module → review the Application Event Log for .NET runtime exceptions → roll back the app pool configuration → confirm resolution and write a postmortem runbook.
A wildcard SSL certificate is expiring in 14 days across 12 IIS sites. Use PowerShell to export the current bindings inventory → import the new certificate to the Windows certificate store → rebind all HTTPS sites → verify with a Splunk query that no SCHANNEL errors appear in the Event Log after rollout.
Response times spike every weekday at 09:00 when users log in. Use Dynatrace APM to identify slow transactions → check Prometheus worker process metrics in Grafana for queue depth → increase application pool worker processes and set request queue limits → validate throughput improvement over the following week.