I spent some of my day today investigating some performance problems with a website hosted in IIS6.
The problem was that this was a live site that received several thousand hits a day. I wanted to be able to quickly find my specific requests in the IIS log.
My solution? Give my browser its own User Agent string. That way I can search for my specific entry in the appropriate log file.
I was using Firefox for this investigation. It's fairly easy to change your User Agent string:
- Go to about:config in the address bar of Firefox
- Right-click in the window and choose New | String.
- Call the Preference Name, "general.useragent.override" and set the Value to something you'll recognise. It's usually safer to take your existing User Agent string (which you can find at http://whatsmyuseragent.com/) and just append something unique.
- Go to http://whatsmyuseragent.com/ and make sure your change has persisted.
Now when looking through the IIS logs, you can just search for your specific User Agent string to find your entries.
Tip: See here for instructions on changing your User Agent in Chrome, and here for some help in IE 8.