Sometimes you can see from Task Manager that a given process is behaving badly. Usually the Image Name column will indicate which app is the problem, or you can add the Proces ID (PID) column to see the process id. But what happens if there are, say, ten processes with the same Image Name, and only one of them is the “bad” one? Then you have to start with the PID & get more info…

For example, there was an issue with one of the application pools under IIS in our testing environment, and while I could see that W3WP.EXE was the culprit (that’s how you know it’s an application pool in IIS6). I didn’t know which pool it was.

So the trick was to open a command line and run the command iisapp. That will list out the application pool names and PIDs of the current machine.

However, if you need to instead find out information on a COM+ Application, you’ll have to open up The Component Services MMC and view the list of COM+ Applications. One of the views will show you the PID of all the COM+ Applications, which allows you to track down info for a specific one using perfmon, process viewer, or some other tool.