Tip for troubleshooting in IIS - finding your requests

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.

To undo your change later, just return to about:config and delete your override entry.

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.