Monitoring & load testing a web server

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Hello,

I'm looking for some software, preferably free, to do the following;

a) Monitor a web server and give information about the number of hits and page requests etc.....

and

b) Perform load/stress test on the web server to test the server capacity

These are W2K3 servers running IIS 6.0.

I have been searching the internet for most of the day and have found that MS do a couple of little tools, IIS Web capacity and IIS Web stress . I've not read much about the web capacity tool, but the Web stress tool looks ok. However, I can only find information for them when they ran on W2K or NT. The latest IIS Resource kit doesn't have either of these tools so i'm unsure whether they will be suitable.

I have found this tool that can analyse W3C log files out of IIS, but there is quite a bit of work in getting it up and running. I was hoping for something a bit more straight forward if possible.

I've also found tons of web stress tools here and here. I'm a little overwhelmed and have no idea how one is better than the other.

I haven't ever had to use this type of software before so I was wondering if you guys, eespecially those who are involved in web development, could offer any good recommendations??

Many thanks,

Stoney