Caution
Grafana Alloy is the new name for our distribution of the OTel collector. Grafana Agent has been deprecated and is in Long-Term Support (LTS) through October 31, 2025. Grafana Agent will reach an End-of-Life (EOL) on November 1, 2025. Read more about why we recommend migrating to Grafana Alloy.
prometheus.exporter.windows
The prometheus.exporter.windows
component embeds
windows_exporter which exposes a
wide variety of hardware and OS metrics for Windows-based systems.
The windows_exporter
itself comprises various collectors, which you can enable and disable as needed.
For more information on collectors, refer to the collectors-list
section.
Note
The black and white list configuration options are available for backwards compatibility but are deprecated. The include and exclude configuration options are preferred going forward.
Usage
prometheus.exporter.windows "LABEL" {
}
Arguments
The following arguments can be used to configure the exporter’s behavior. All arguments are optional. Omitted fields take their default values.
enabled_collectors
defines a hand-picked list of enabled-by-default collectors.
If set, anything not provided in that list is disabled by default.
Refer to the Collectors list for the default set.
Blocks
The following blocks are supported inside the definition of
prometheus.exporter.windows
to configure collector-specific options:
dfsr block
exchange block
The collectors specified by enabled_list
can include the following:
ADAccessProcesses
TransportQueues
HttpProxy
ActiveSync
AvailabilityService
OutlookWebAccess
Autodiscover
WorkloadManagement
RpcClientAccess
For example, enabled_list
may be set to "AvailabilityService,OutlookWebAccess"
.
iis block
logical_disk block
Volume names must match the regular expression specified by include
and must not match the regular expression specified by exclude
to be included.
msmq block
Specifying enabled_classes
is useful to limit the response to the MSMQs you specify, reducing the size of the response.
mssql block
network block
NIC names must match the regular expression specified by include
and must not match the regular expression specified by exclude
to be included.
process block
Processes must match the regular expression specified by include
and must not match the regular expression specified by exclude
to be included.
scheduled_task block
For a server name to be included, it must match the regular expression specified by include
and must not match the regular expression specified by exclude
.
service block
The where_clause
argument can be used to limit the response to the services you specify, reducing the size of the response.
If use_api
is enabled, ‘where_clause’ won’t be effective.
The Windows API is more performant than WMI. Set use_api
to true
in situations when the WMI takes too long to get the service information.
Setting use_api
to true
does have a few disadvantages compared to using WMI:
- WMI queries in
where_clause
won’t work. - The
status
field of the service is not available. You can use thestate
property to retrieve status information. This property provides the same information, but it is formatted differently.
smtp block
For a server name to be included, it must match the regular expression specified by include
and must not match the regular expression specified by exclude
.
text_file block
When text_file_directory
is set, only files with the extension .prom
inside the specified directory are read. Each .prom
file found must end with an empty line feed to work properly.
Exported fields
The following fields are exported and can be referenced by other components.
For example, the targets
can either be passed to a discovery.relabel
component to rewrite the targets’ label sets or to a prometheus.scrape
component that collects the exposed metrics.
The exported targets use the configured in-memory traffic address specified by the run command.
Component health
prometheus.exporter.windows
is only reported as unhealthy if given
an invalid configuration. In those cases, exported fields retain their last
healthy values.
Debug information
prometheus.exporter.windows
does not expose any component-specific
debug information.
Debug metrics
prometheus.exporter.windows
does not expose any component-specific
debug metrics.
Collectors list
The following table lists the available collectors that windows_exporter
brings
bundled in. Some collectors only work on specific operating systems; enabling a
collector that is not supported by the host OS where Flow is running
is a no-op.
Users can choose to enable a subset of collectors to limit the amount of
metrics exposed by the prometheus.exporter.windows
component,
or disable collectors that are expensive to run.
Refer to the linked documentation on each collector for more information on reported metrics, configuration settings and usage examples.
Caution
Certain collectors will cause Grafana Agent to crash if those collectors are used and the required infrastructure isn’t installed. These include but aren’t limited to mscluster_*, vmware, nps, dns, msmq, teradici_pcoip, ad, hyperv, and scheduled_task.
Example
This example uses a prometheus.scrape
component to collect metrics
from prometheus.exporter.windows
:
prometheus.exporter.windows "default" { }
// Configure a prometheus.scrape component to collect windows metrics.
prometheus.scrape "example" {
targets = prometheus.exporter.windows.default.targets
forward_to = [prometheus.remote_write.demo.receiver]
}
prometheus.remote_write "demo" {
endpoint {
url = PROMETHEUS_REMOTE_WRITE_URL
basic_auth {
username = USERNAME
password = PASSWORD
}
}
}
Replace the following:
PROMETHEUS_REMOTE_WRITE_URL
: The URL of the Prometheus remote_write-compatible server to send metrics to.USERNAME
: The username to use for authentication to the remote_write API.PASSWORD
: The password to use for authentication to the remote_write API.
Compatible components
prometheus.exporter.windows
has exports that can be consumed by the following components:
- Components that consume Targets
Note
Connecting some components may not be sensible or components may require further configuration to make the connection work correctly. Refer to the linked documentation for more details.