Open Source Summit Europe 2024

Are you struggling to monitor Windows on Kubernetes as a developer? With the limited support stack available, it can be a challenging task to keep track of everything. Kubernetes now supports HostProcess containers on Windows nodes. As a result, the Windows exporter, a Prometheus exporter for Windows, can be deployed as a host process pod. This feature is introduced as an add-on in the kube-prometheus project. This talk will implement a monitoring stack using Windows exporter on a Windows node in Kubernetes. We start by diving into various metric collectors, their functionalities, and utilization. Subsequently, demonstrate how to implement the Windows exporter, configure a ServiceMonitor, and deploy a Prometheus instance. Once Prometheus is up and running, we highlight the differences in the monitoring approach compared to Linux machines. Finally, we complete the monitoring experience with a Grafana dashboard analyzing the collected metrics.