I've been reading for a long time on various places about modules and how they work with IIS 7+. On a test server we installed Advanced Logging and got it configured the way we would like. A question came up though that I can't answer and that is will it take down any of our websites if I install the module? There are a few posts out there that talk about how to install the Advanced logging and some of them mention restarting IIS, or restarting the application pools (which I opted to not do just to see if I really had too, turns out I didn't have to) but as I've learned in the past is to not trust that if I didn't explictly do something it doesn't mean it wasn't done in the background.
The concern boils down to that we have 1 particular website that we want to installed Advanced Logging to. The website is heavily used 24/7 and taking it down unintentionally could get me in loads of trouble. hence my question. If I do install this will it take down our website temporarily to install the module or will it be smart about it and the feature will be available as the app pools cycle on their own?
It depends on the module and what the module changes, if the module modifies the web.config then it will will cause the application pools to restart.
Some modules will modify the applicationhost.config. I believe this module does that and it really depends on what gets modified in that file, some modification will cause restarting and others will not.
You can definitely test installing it on a test machine and see if the pools recycle. That's the approach I would take to get a definitive answer.