Windows Servers Overview

This dashboard provides a summary of all the Windows servers in a Prometheus data source. It uses windows_exporter to collect metrics.

• It sorts by Status followed by Hostname, so servers that are down are at the top. This can be overridden by sorting by any column.
• Revision shows the latest OS update, which is useful as a quick check that the operating system is fully patched
• Thresholds are set to draw attention to potential problems (servers that have rebooted recently, servers that are low on RAM, or servers that have nearly full volumes)
• It shows the volume with the least disk space available (by percentage of total space) and how much space is being used
• It uses rate instead of irate
  • It doesn’t seem like this should be necessary to mention, but every other community dashboard I looked at uses irate
  • References:
    • https://grafana.com/blog/2020/09/28/new-in-grafana-7.2-__rate_interval-for-prometheus-rate-queries-that-just-work/
    • https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/sysadmin/PrometheusRateVsIrate
• The Hostname can be configured as a link to a dashboard showing more detailed metrics for that server (see notes below)

More detailed info: GitHub repo

Linking Server Specific Metrics using the Hostname field

1. Add a field override using the “Fields with name” option, and specify the Hostname field
2. Add an override property using the “Data Links” option
3. Add a link
   • Title: $hostname
   • URL: <dashboard specific URL>&var-hostname=${__data.fields.hostname}
     • Example: /grafana/d/edgz29vfxxdkwe/windows-server?orgId=1&var-hostname=${__data.fields.hostname}

Note: You could specify the dashboard UID in your JSON file to avoid having to manually configure this. However, if a dashboard already exists with that UID, it will be overwritten.