windows_exporter/docs/collector.service.md

service collector

The service collector exposes metrics about Windows Services

The collector exists in 2 different version. Version 1 is using WMI to query all services and is able to provide additional information. Version 2 is a more efficient solution by directly connecting to the service manager, but is not able to provide additional information like run_as or start configuration

Flags

--collector.service.services-where

A WMI filter on which services to include. Recommended to keep down number of returned metrics.

Example: --collector.service.services-where="Name='windows_exporter'"

Example config win_exporter.yml for multiple services: services-where: Name='SQLServer' OR Name='Couchbase' OR Name='Spooler' OR Name='ActiveMQ'

--collector.service.use-api

Uses API calls instead of WMI for performance optimization. Note the previous flag (--collector.service.services-where) won't have any effect on this mode.

--collector.service.v2

Version 2 of the service collector. Is using API calls for performance optimization. Note the previous flag (--collector.service.services-where) won't have any effect on this mode. For additional performance reasons, it doesn't provide any additional information like run_as or start configuration.

collector V1

Metric name prefix	service
Classes	Win32_Service
Enabled by default?	Yes

Metrics

Name	Description	Type	Labels
windows_service_info	Contains service information in labels, constant 1	gauge	name, display_name, process_id, run_as
windows_service_state	The state of the service, 1 if the current state, 0 otherwise	gauge	name, state
windows_service_start_mode	The start mode of the service, 1 if the current start mode, 0 otherwise	gauge	name, start_mode
windows_service_status	The status of the service, 1 if the current status, 0 otherwise	gauge	name, status

For the values of the state, start_mode, status and run_as labels, see below.

States

A service can be in the following states:

• stopped
• start pending
• stop pending
• running
• continue pending
• pause pending
• paused
• unknown

Start modes

A service can have the following start modes:

• boot
• system
• auto
• manual
• disabled

Status (not available in API mode)

A service can have any of the following statuses:

• ok
• error
• degraded
• unknown
• pred fail
• starting
• stopping
• service
• stressed
• nonrecover
• no contact
• lost comm

Note that there is some overlap with service state.

Run As

Account name under which a service runs. Depending on the service type, the account name may be in the form of "DomainName\Username" or UPN format ("Username@DomainName").

It corresponds to the StartName attribute of the Win32_Service class. StartName attribute can be NULL and in such case the label is reported as an empty string. Notice that if the attribute is NULL the service is logged on as the LocalSystem account or, for kernel or system-level drive, it runs with a default object name created by the I/O system based on the service name, for example, DWDOM\Admin.

Example metric

Lists the services that have a 'disabled' start mode.

windows_service_start_mode{exported_name=~"(mssqlserver|sqlserveragent)",start_mode="disabled"}

Useful queries

Counts the number of Microsoft SQL Server/Agent Processes

count(windows_service_state{exported_name=~"(sqlserveragent|mssqlserver)",state="running"})

collector V2

Metric name prefix	service
Classes	none
Enabled by default?	No

Metrics

Name	Description	Type	Labels
windows_service_state	The state of the service, 1 if the current state, 0 otherwise	gauge	name, display_name, state

States

A service can be in the following states:

• stopped
• start pending
• stop pending
• running
• continue pending
• pause pending
• paused
• unknown

Example metric

windows_service_state{display_name="Declared Configuration(DC) service",name="dcsvc",status="continue pending"} 0
windows_service_state{display_name="Declared Configuration(DC) service",name="dcsvc",status="pause pending"} 0
windows_service_state{display_name="Declared Configuration(DC) service",name="dcsvc",status="paused"} 0
windows_service_state{display_name="Declared Configuration(DC) service",name="dcsvc",status="running"} 0
windows_service_state{display_name="Declared Configuration(DC) service",name="dcsvc",status="start pending"} 0
windows_service_state{display_name="Declared Configuration(DC) service",name="dcsvc",status="stop pending"} 0
windows_service_state{display_name="Declared Configuration(DC) service",name="dcsvc",status="stopped"} 1

Useful queries

Counts the number of Microsoft SQL Server/Agent Processes

count(windows_service_state{name=~"(sqlserveragent|mssqlserver)",state="running"})

Alerting examples

prometheus.rules

groups:
- name: Microsoft SQL Server Alerts
  rules:

  # Sends an alert when the 'sqlserveragent' service is not in the running state for 3 minutes.
  - alert: SQL Server Agent DOWN
    expr: windows_service_state{instance="SQL",name="sqlserveragent",state="running"} == 0
    for: 3m
    labels:
      severity: high
    annotations:
      summary: "Service {{ $labels.exported_name }} down"
      description: "Service {{ $labels.exported_name }} on instance {{ $labels.instance }} has been down for more than 3 minutes."

  # Sends an alert when the 'mssqlserver' service is not in the running state for 3 minutes.
  - alert: SQL Server DOWN
    expr: windows_service_state{instance="SQL",name="mssqlserver",state="running"} == 0
    for: 3m
    labels:
      severity: high
    annotations:
      summary: "Service {{ $labels.exported_name }} down"
      description: "Service {{ $labels.exported_name }} on instance {{ $labels.instance }} has been down for more than 3 minutes."

In this example, instance is the target label of the host. So each alert will be processed per host, which is then used in the alert description.