windows_exporter/docs/collector.physical_disk.md

physical_disk collector

The physical_disk collector exposes metrics about physical disks

Metric name prefix	physical_disk
Data source	Performance Data
Counters	PhysicalDisk
Enabled by default?	Yes

Flags

--collector.physical_disk.disk-include

If given, a disk needs to match the include regular expression in order for the corresponding disk metrics to be reported. Default: .+

--collector.physical_disk.disk-exclude

If given, a disk needs to not match the exclude regular expression in order for the corresponding disk metrics to be reported. Default: empty

Metrics

Name	Description	Type	Labels
windows_physical_disk_requests_queued	The number of requests queued to the disk (PhysicalDisk.CurrentDiskQueueLength)	Gauge	disk
windows_physical_disk_read_bytes_total	The number of bytes transferred from the disk during read operations (PhysicalDisk.DiskReadBytesPerSec)	Counter	disk
windows_physical_disk_reads_total	The number of read operations on the disk (PhysicalDisk.DiskReadsPerSec)	Counter	disk
windows_physical_disk_write_bytes_total	The number of bytes transferred to the disk during write operations (PhysicalDisk.DiskWriteBytesPerSec)	Counter	disk
windows_physical_disk_writes_total	The number of write operations on the disk (PhysicalDisk.DiskWritesPerSec)	Counter	disk
windows_physical_disk_read_seconds_total	Seconds that the disk was busy servicing read requests (PhysicalDisk.PercentDiskReadTime)	Counter	disk
windows_physical_disk_write_seconds_total	Seconds that the disk was busy servicing write requests (PhysicalDisk.PercentDiskWriteTime)	Counter	disk
windows_physical_disk_idle_seconds_total	Seconds that the disk was idle (PhysicalDisk.PercentIdleTime)	Counter	disk
windows_physical_disk_split_ios_total	The number of I/Os to the disk that were split into multiple I/Os (PhysicalDisk.SplitIOPerSec)	Counter	disk
windows_physical_disk_read_latency_seconds_total	The average time, in seconds, of a read operation from the disk (PhysicalDisk.AvgDiskSecPerRead)	Counter	disk
windows_physical_disk_write_latency_seconds_total	The average time, in seconds, of a write operation to the disk (PhysicalDisk.AvgDiskSecPerWrite)	Counter	disk
windows_physical_disk_read_write_latency_seconds_total	The time, in seconds, of the average disk transfer (PhysicalDisk.AvgDiskSecPerTransfer)	Counter	disk

Idle time

windows_physical_disk_idle_seconds_total is the % Idle Time counter, converted to seconds: the cumulative idle time of the disk. Windows updates it unevenly while the disk is busy and catches up afterwards, so the rate over a short window can exceed 1 right after a burst of I/O. Performance Monitor also shows values above 100%. The errors mostly cancel out over longer windows, but can still push a 5m rate slightly above 1. Clamp the rate to 1 when you derive the busy time from it:

1 - clamp_max(rate(windows_physical_disk_idle_seconds_total[5m]), 1)

Example metric

Query the rate of write operations to a disk

rate(windows_physical_disk_read_bytes_total{instance="localhost", disk=~"0"}[2m])

Useful queries

Calculate rate of total IOPS for disk

rate(windows_physical_disk_reads_total{instance="localhost", disk=~"0"}[2m]) + rate(windows_physical_disk_writes_total{instance="localhost", disk=~"0"}[2m])

Alerting examples

This collector does not yet have alerting examples, we would appreciate your help adding them!