Windows Services

Ship your Windows Services Metrics via Telegraf to your Logit.io Stack

Follow the steps below to send your observability data to Logit.io

Metrics

Configure Telegraf to ship Windows Services metrics to your Logit.io stacks via Logstash.

Install Integration

Please click on the Install Integration button to configure your stack for this source.

Install Telegraf

This integration allows you to configure a Telegraf agent to send your metrics, in multiple formats, to Logit.io.

Choose the installation method for your operating system:

When you paste the command below into Powershell it will download the Telegraf zip file. Once that is complete, press Enter again and the zip file will be extracted into C:\Program Files\InfluxData\telegraf\telegraf-1.31.2.

wget https://dl.influxdata.com/telegraf/releases/telegraf-1.31.2_windows_amd64.zip -UseBasicParsing -OutFile telegraf-1.31.2_windows_amd64.zip 
Expand-Archive .\telegraf-1.31.2_windows_amd64.zip -DestinationPath 'C:\Program Files\InfluxData\telegraf'

Configure the Telegraf input plugin

The configuration file below is pre-configured to scrape the system metrics from your hosts, add the following code to the configuration file /etc/telegraf/telegraf.conf from the previous step.

# Input plugin to report Windows services info.
# This plugin ONLY supports Windows
[[inputs.win_services]]
  ## Names of the services to monitor. Leave empty to monitor all the available services on the host. Globs accepted. Case sensitive.
  service_names = [
    "LanmanServer",
    "TermService",
    "Win*",
  ]
  excluded_service_names = ['WinRM'] # optional, list of service names to exclude

Read more about how to configure data scraping and configuration options for Windows Services (opens in a new tab)

Configure the output plugin

Once you have generated the configuration file, you need to set up the output plug-in to allow Telegraf to transmit your data to Logit.io in Prometheus format. This can be accomplished by incorporating the following code into your configuration file:

[[outputs.http]]
  url = "https://@metricsUsername:@metricsPassword@@metrics_id-vm.logit.io:@vmAgentPort/api/v1/write"
  data_format = "prometheusremotewrite"
 
  [outputs.http.headers]
    Content-Type = "application/x-protobuf"
    Content-Encoding = "snappy"

Start Telegraf

From the location where Telegraf was installed (C:\Program Files\InfluxData\telegraf\telegraf-1.31.2) run the program providing the chosen configuration file as a parameter:

.\telegraf.exe --config telegraf-demo.conf

Once Telegraf is running you should see output similar to the following, which confirms the inputs, output and basic configuration the application has been started with: Powershell Telegraf information

View your metrics

Data should now have been sent to your Stack.

View My Data

If you don't see take a look at How to diagnose no data in Stack below for how to diagnose common issues.

How to diagnose no data in Stack

If you don't see data appearing in your stack after following this integration, take a look at the troubleshooting guide for steps to diagnose and resolve the problem or contact our support team and we'll be happy to assist.

Telegraf Windows Services metrics Overview

For effectively monitoring and analyzing Windows services metrics in a distributed environment, it's crucial to utilize a robust and reliable metrics management solution. Telegraf, an open-source server agent recognized for its metrics collection capabilities, serves as an excellent tool for collecting Windows services metrics from a wide range of sources, such as active Windows servers, databases, and other related software applications.

Telegraf comes equipped with an extensive variety of input plugins, allowing users to amass metrics from several sources like CPU usage, memory consumption, network activity, and more. To store and interrogate these gathered metrics, organizations can utilize Prometheus, an open-source monitoring and alerting system known for its flexible querying language and powerful graphic data visualization.

To transport Windows services metrics from Telegraf to Prometheus, organizations need to configure Telegraf to output metrics in the Prometheus format, followed by using Prometheus to scrape these metrics from the Telegraf server. This process entails setting up Telegraf to gather Windows services metrics and output them in the Prometheus format, arranging Prometheus to fetch these metrics from the Telegraf server, and then analyzing and visualizing the data using Prometheus's flexible querying and visualization tools.

Once the metrics are successfully imported into Prometheus, they can be further scrutinized and visualized using Grafana. Grafana, an open-source platform known for its monitoring and observability capabilities, is fully compatible with Prometheus. It provides users the ability to create dynamic, interactive dashboards for a deeper dive into metrics data, enabling a more thorough understanding of performance trends and potential issues.

If you need any further assistance with shipping your log data to Logit.io we're here to help you get started. Feel free to get in contact with our support team by sending us a message via live chat & we'll be happy to assist.

Windows Performance Winlogbeat