Windows OS Services Monitoring

Windows Services are a special type of application that is configured to launch and run in the background similar to a Unix daemon. In some cases a Windows service can run before the user has even logged in as the local system account. Since services are designed to run continuously in the background, they often perform system tasks, like running a server process that listens on a network port.

It is important to note that a service must be installed and registered with Windows, which requires an administrator account, and usually a User Account Control prompt, before that happens.

Why use the Windows Services Telegraf plugin?

Servers may rely on having some Windows OS services started when the server boots up as well as stopped when the server shuts downs. Since these services need to run continuously, monitoring that they continue to run is important to avoid any disruptions to the applications running the server. Monitoring all your services will allow you to set up alerts to keep track of these services and send alerts when one of these services stops or is down.

In addition, you can combine these Windows Services metrics with other metrics like Windows Performance Counters, CPU/Memory usage and allocation, and you start to get a complete picture of the performance of your application and environment.

How to monitor Windows Services using the Telegraf plugin

Configuring the Windows Services Telegraf Plugin is simple and will allow you to track the status of the Windows services. Just list the specific services to monitor, or if you leave it empty, Telegraf will monitor all the available services on the host. Once the Windows Services Telegraf Plugin is configured and pointing to your InfluxDB instance, you will be able to collect and gain insights on the metrics collected.

Key Windows Services metrics to use for monitoring

Some of the important Windows Services metrics that you should proactively monitor include:

• win_services
  • state : integer
  • startup_mode : integer

The state field can have the following values:

• 1 - stopped
• 2 - start pending
• 3 - stop pending
• 4 - running
• 5 - continue pending
• 6 - pause pending
• 7 - paused

The startup_mode field can have the following values:

• 0 - boot start
• 1 - system start
• 2 - auto start
• 3 - demand start
• 4 - disabled

All measurements have the following tags:

• service_name
• display_name

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