How to enable Application Pool recycle logging

In this article we’ll discuss How to enable Application Pool recycle logging in IIS and where to find the resulting logs history. By default, IIS do not log all the events so we need to instruct it so that all the recycling event information can be logged and traced if required while doing troubleshooting.

App Pool recycles will only trigger for active Worker process. If no one is using the application, then due to inactivity no worker process will be active, and App Pool recycles will not trigger and no logs can be seen in event viewer.

Steps to Enable Application Pool recycle logging

• Open IIS Manager and expand the server’s name then Application Pools. List of application pool will be visible to you.

• Right Click the application pool for which you want to enable the recycle logging, now click the “Advanced Settings“.
• Next, expand “Generate Recycle Event Log Entry” then set the desired child nodes to True, then click OK.  

How to check app pool recycle history:

Now to check Application Pool recycle events logs in event viewer, simply open the Event Viewer and click on the standard System event log.

In my case I just cleared the event logs manually and then recycle the desired application pool. After this I was able to see the event entry shown below:

A lot more event entries will be there in event logs. To view only Application Pool “recycle events” you can add a filter to see required event only. Hence using the above steps, you can enable Application Pool recycle logging and can view app pool recycle history logs.

I hope with the end of this article you got the understanding on “How to enable Application Pool recycle logging” and “How to check app pool recycle history“.

You can check more on IIS in our IIS Section. You can also check more concepts of IIS on Microsoft Learn too.