Monitoring a Windows environment

The standard monitoring agent cannot be installed on a Windows platform. To monitor a Windows system with IBM Cloud Monitoring use the Windows Prometheus Bundle to collect the metrics from a Windows system.

The Windows Prometheus Bundle is a comprehensive package that installs and configures a Prometheus Agent and the Windows Exporter allowing you to send metrics to your IBM Cloud Monitoring instance.

Complete the following steps to configure a Windows system to send metrics to a Monitoring instance by downloading and using the installer.

You can also install the Windows Prometheus Bundle using the command line. See Installing using a command line for more information.

Configure the Windows Prometheus Bundle

The Windows Prometheus Bundle provides an installation wizard that installs the required agent and Prometheus Windows exporter Windows service and allows you to select your choice of collectors.

If you accept the defaults when installing using the wizard, the following collectors will be enabled:

Default collectors
Collector	Description
`cpu`	CPU metrics
`cs`	Computer system metrics
`logical_disk`	Disk metrics
`os`	Operating System metrics
`system`	System metrics
`net`	Network interface metrics

All collectors that can be configured can be found in the Prometheus exporter documentation.

Complete the following steps to configure the Windows Prometheus Bundle in your Windows system:

Download the Windows Prometheus Bundle binary installer from the latest project release.
Run the installer on your Windows system.
Configure the ingestion endpoints for remote write and your Monitor API token in the wizard.
Click Next.
For the Host Configuration do not change the port or IP values. Specify any additional CLI flags or remote IP addresses required for your Windows Firewall.
Click Next.
Select the collectors that you want to enable to generate metrics.

Windows Exporter selections

The most commonly used metrics can be selected. Additional Windows Exporter metrics can be added as a comma separated list.
Metrics in Promethus format can be written by other processes to a file on the system. These metrics can be exported and sent to IBM Cloud Monitoring by selecting Prometheus metrics from files then indicating the directory where the metrics are located.
Click Install then Finish to complete the installation.

Monitor Windows system metrics

You can use the default dashboard Windows Host Overview to view the Windows metrics. This default dashboard is located in the Dashboards > Applications section. The Windows Process Overview dashboard is available when you have process metrics enabled. The Windows Services Overview dashboard is available when you have service metrics enabled. You can also search the Alerts > Library for Windows for available default alerts.