windows_exporter/dashboard/README.md

Sample dashboard for Windows Exporter

windows-exporter-dashboard.json is a Grafana dashboard for hosts monitored by windows_exporter. It was originally inspired by this dashboard in Chinese and takes several ideas from Grafana's windows-observ-lib.

Requirements

• Grafana 13 or later with a Prometheus data source. The file uses the v2 dashboard schema, which Grafana needs for tabs.
• windows_exporter with the default collectors (cpu, logical_disk, memory, net, os, physical_disk, service, system). The SMB, Processes, Scheduled tasks, Updates, GPU, Hyper-V and Time tabs, the TCP and UDP rows of the Network tab and the Drives and Storage Spaces rows of the Disk tab need the smb or smbclient, process, scheduled_task, update, gpu, hyperv, time, tcp, udp, diskdrive and storage_spaces collectors, which are not enabled by default. The sample shows every tab; build the dashboard from the mixin with your collectors to hide the others. The process names in the GPU tab need the process collector. GPU temperature, fan, power and clock panels require WDDM 2.4 or newer and driver support; unsupported sensors are absent.

Import the JSON file through Dashboards > New > Import and pick the Prometheus data source in the Data source variable.

Variables

Variable	Description
Data source	The Prometheus data source to query.
Job	One or more scrape jobs.
Hostname	Narrows the fleet overview and the instance list to the selected hostnames.
Instance	The host shown in all tabs except Fleet.
Volume	Volumes shown in the Overview and Disk tabs. HarddiskVolume* are hidden.
Network interface	Interfaces shown in the Overview and Network tabs.
Process	One or more process names shown in the Processes tab, or All.
Top N processes	Maximum processes per graph: 5, 10 (default), or 20.

The Reboots annotation marks each reboot of the selected host on all graphs.

Tabs

Tab	Content
Fleet	Counts of hosts, hosts down and hosts above the CPU, memory and disk alert thresholds or with stopped automatic services; one row per host with OS version, uptime, CPU, memory, commit charge, C: and fullest volume usage and stopped automatic services; graphs of the 25 highest hosts, including the busiest interface per host.
Overview	Summary of the selected host: operating system, uptime, CPUs, memory, commit charge, volumes, disk and network throughput.
CPU	Utilization by mode and per core, processor queue length, context switches, interrupts, processes, threads, system calls and the effective CPU frequency.
Memory	Used and available physical memory, commit charge, hard page faults, kernel pools and the system cache.
Disk	Volume label, disk, file system, size and free space, usage, busy time, throughput, IOPS, latency and queue length; drive model, size, partitions and status; busy time, throughput, IOPS, latency, queue length and split I/O per physical disk, labelled with the drive model when diskdrive is enabled; health, size and usage of Storage Spaces pools and health, size, pool footprint and efficiency of their virtual disks.
Network	Throughput, utilization, packets, errors and discards per interface; TCP connection states and rates, segments and retransmissions; UDP datagrams and errors.
SMB	Open files, connections, traffic, requests and opened files per share this host serves; traffic, requests, latency, queue length, credit stalls and metadata requests per remote share this host uses.
Services	Running, pending and disabled services, automatic services that are not running, and services that started or stopped in the time range.
Processes	CPU usage, working set, private bytes, I/O throughput and operations, threads, handles and page faults per process, labelled with name and PID.
Scheduled tasks	Task count, running, disabled and never-run tasks, enabled tasks with an unknown result code or missed runs, tasks that ran in the time range, and all tasks with state, last result and missed runs.
Updates	Pending updates by severity and category, the oldest pending update, the time since the last Windows Update check, a list of pending updates and the query duration.
GPU	Utilization by engine type, memory capacity, commitment and locality, temperature, fans, power, clocks, and top processes by GPU utilization and memory.
Hyper-V	VM count and health, Hyper-V WMI health, host CPU time, CPU and memory per VM, virtual disks, virtual switches and VM network adapters.
Time	Time zone, clock sync source, NTP time sources, clock offset and NTP round-trip delay.
Exporter	Scrape status and duration, exporter version and uptime, collector status, duration, failures and timeouts, and the exporter's CPU, memory, handles and Go runtime.

Click a hostname in the Fleet tab to open that host in the Overview tab.

Each per-host tab starts with a row of current values, each with a sparkline of the time range behind it. Green, orange and red show health against fixed thresholds; values without a meaningful threshold, like throughput or counts, stay in the text color.

The Processes tab starts with totals for all selected processes: process count, threads, handles, CPU usage across the host, private working set and private bytes. The synthetic Idle process (PID 0) is excluded. Each graph shows at most Top N processes, ranked separately at the end of the time range, with a fixed set of process IDs across the graph. Processes that exited before that point may not appear. I/O graphs combine read, write and other operations per process.

Changing the dashboard

Don't edit the JSON file by hand. It is generated from Jsonnet with grafonnet as part of the windows_exporter mixin:

• dashboards/windows-exporter.libsonnet composes the dashboard from one file per tab.
• dashboards/builders.libsonnet holds the panel, query, and layout builders.
• dashboards/styles.libsonnet shares the visualization defaults.

The generator writes the v2 schema directly, so it needs neither Grafana nor Prometheus. Install mise and Go, then install the pinned tools and regenerate the file in contrib/mixin (use WSL on Windows):

cd contrib/mixin
mise trust
mise install
mise run dashboard

mise run dashboard runs jb install to fetch grafonnet into contrib/mixin/vendor and renders the dashboard. mise run lint fails if the committed JSON file differs from the generated one. mise run check-dashboards rebuilds it and runs git diff --exit-code, as CI does before the mixin tests. Check new or changed queries in Grafana before you open a pull request, for example by importing the file into a local Grafana 13.