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.

Flow mode

Reference

Components reference

prometheus.exporter.windows

Open source

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.

Name	Type	Description	Default	Required
`enabled_collectors`	`list(string)`	List of collectors to enable.	`["cpu","cs","logical_disk","net","os","service","system"]`	no
`timeout`	`duration`	Configure timeout for collecting metrics.	`4m`	no

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:

Hierarchy	Name	Description	Required
dfsr	dfsr	Configures the dfsr collector.	no
exchange	exchange	Configures the exchange collector.	no
iis	iis	Configures the iis collector.	no
logical_disk	logical_disk	Configures the logical_disk collector.	no
msmq	msmq	Configures the msmq collector.	no
mssql	mssql	Configures the mssql collector.	no
network	network	Configures the network collector.	no
process	process	Configures the process collector.	no
scheduled_task	scheduled_task	Configures the scheduled_task collector.	no
service	service	Configures the service collector.	no
smtp	smtp	Configures the smtp collector.	no
text_file	text_file	Configures the text_file collector.	no

dfsr block

Name	Type	Description	Default	Required
`source_enabled`	`list(string)`	Comma-separated list of DFSR Perflib sources to use.	`["connection","folder","volume"]`	no

exchange block

Name	Type	Description	Default	Required
`enabled_list`	`string`	Comma-separated list of collectors to use.	`""`	no

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

Name	Type	Description	Default	Required
`app_exclude`	`string`	Regular expression of applications to ignore.	`""`	no
`app_include`	`string`	Regular expression of applications to report on.	`".*"`	no
`site_exclude`	`string`	Regular expression of sites to ignore.	`""`	no
`site_include`	`string`	Regular expression of sites to report on.	`".*"`	no

logical_disk block

Name	Type	Description	Default	Required
`exclude`	`string`	Regular expression of volumes to exclude.	`""`	no
`include`	`string`	Regular expression of volumes to include.	`".+"`	no

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

Name	Type	Description	Default	Required
`where_clause`	`string`	WQL ‘where’ clause to use in WMI metrics query.	`""`	no

Specifying enabled_classes is useful to limit the response to the MSMQs you specify, reducing the size of the response.

mssql block

Name	Type	Description	Default	Required
`enabled_classes`	`list(string)`	Comma-separated list of MSSQL WMI classes to use.	`["accessmethods", "availreplica", "bufman", "databases", "dbreplica", "genstats", "locks", "memmgr", "sqlstats", "sqlerrorstransactions"]`	no

network block

Name	Type	Description	Default	Required
`exclude`	`string`	Regular expression of NIC:s to exclude.	`""`	no
`include`	`string`	Regular expression of NIC:s to include.	`".*"`	no

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

Name	Type	Description	Default	Required
`exclude`	`string`	Regular expression of processes to exclude.	`""`	no
`include`	`string`	Regular expression of processes to include.	`".*"`	no

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

Name	Type	Description	Default	Required
`exclude`	`string`	Regexp of tasks to exclude.	`""`	no
`include`	`string`	Regexp of tasks to include.	`".+"`	no

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

Name	Type	Description	Default	Required
`use_api`	`string`	Use the Windows API to collect service data instead of WMI.	`false`	no
`where_clause`	`string`	WQL ‘where’ clause to use in WMI metrics query.	`""`	no

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 the state property to retrieve status information. This property provides the same information, but it is formatted differently.

smtp block

Name	Type	Description	Default	Required
`exclude`	`string`	Regexp of virtual servers to ignore.		no
`include`	`string`	Regexp of virtual servers to include.	`".+"`	no

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

Name	Type	Description	Default	Required
`text_file_directory`	`string`	The directory containing the files to be ingested.	`C:\Program Files\Grafana Agent Flow\textfile_inputs`	no

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.

Name	Type	Description
`targets`	`list(map(string))`	The targets that can be used to collect exporter metrics.

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.

Name	Description	Enabled by default
ad	Active Directory Domain Services
adcs	Active Directory Certificate Services
adfs	Active Directory Federation Services
cache	Cache metrics
cpu	CPU usage	✓
cpu_info	CPU Information
cs	“Computer System” metrics (system properties, num cpus/total memory)	✓
container	Container metrics
dfsr	DFSR metrics
dhcp	DHCP Server
dns	DNS Server
exchange	Exchange metrics
fsrmquota	Microsoft File Server Resource Manager (FSRM) Quotas collector
hyperv	Hyper-V hosts
iis	IIS sites and applications
logical_disk	Logical disks, disk I/O	✓
logon	User logon sessions
memory	Memory usage metrics
mscluster_cluster	MSCluster cluster metrics
mscluster_network	MSCluster network metrics
mscluster_node	MSCluster Node metrics
mscluster_resource	MSCluster Resource metrics
mscluster_resourcegroup	MSCluster ResourceGroup metrics
msmq	MSMQ queues
mssql	SQL Server Performance Objects metrics
netframework_clrexceptions	.NET Framework CLR Exceptions
netframework_clrinterop	.NET Framework Interop Metrics
netframework_clrjit	.NET Framework JIT metrics
netframework_clrloading	.NET Framework CLR Loading metrics
netframework_clrlocksandthreads	.NET Framework locks and metrics threads
netframework_clrmemory	.NET Framework Memory metrics
netframework_clrremoting	.NET Framework Remoting metrics
netframework_clrsecurity	.NET Framework Security Check metrics
net	Network interface I/O	✓
os	OS metrics (memory, processes, users)	✓
physical_disk	Physical disks	✓
process	Per-process metrics
remote_fx	RemoteFX protocol (RDP) metrics
scheduled_task	Scheduled Tasks metrics
service	Service state metrics	✓
smtp	IIS SMTP Server
system	System calls	✓
tcp	TCP connections
teradici_pcoip	Teradici PCoIP session metrics
time	Windows Time Service
thermalzone	Thermal information
terminal_services	Terminal services (RDS)
textfile	Read prometheus metrics from a text file
vmware_blast	VMware Blast session metrics
vmware	Performance counters installed by the Vmware Guest agent

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.

Was this page helpful?

Suggest an edit in GitHub

Create a GitHub issue

Email docs@grafana.com

Help and support

Community

Feedback

Relevant sources:

Feedback

prometheus.exporter.windows

Usage

Arguments