Grafana/Prometheus/WindowsExporter works to star with but then breaks :(

Grafana Configuration
1

  • What Grafana version and what operating system are you using?
    Latest version (couldn’t find it easily in the UI)

  • What are you trying to achieve?
    Display Windows stats that update every second.

  • How are you trying to achieve it?
    Basic Grafana/Prometheus/WindowsExporter installaiton with the “Windows Exporter Dashboard 2024” dashboard. Then, going into grafana config file to update min_refresh_interval = 1s, then updating the dashboard refresh options.

Followed this guide to get set up:
Youtube

  • What happened?
    Dashboard working fine to begin with. Tried two approaches to updating the grafana config:

First, copied defaults.ini and called it custom.ini. Then updated the min_refresh_interval in there. Dashboard breaks - stops getting data (see picture).

Also, made copy of vanilla defaults.ini file and then just updated the defaults.ini.Same issue. You can see that it stops getting data as per this screenie:

Screenshot 2025-04-08 154008
Screenshot 2025-04-08 154008991×531 83.4 KB

Tests:
WindowsExporter is working fine. If I refresh http://localhost:9182/metrics - I get different values each time.
It also seems to be linked with Prometheus OK too:

Screenshot 2025-04-08 154310
Screenshot 2025-04-08 1543101225×164 6.13 KB

It just appears broken in Grafana. I also tied uninstalling and reinstalling the dashboard - no joy. Also tried a restart - again - no joy.

As an aside, the “min_refresh_interval = 1s” change is registered because I can change this in the grafana UI. It just seems to break the stats reporting.

Also, had updated

  • What did you expect to happen?
    For the dash to continue working and for me to be able to lower the update time to 1s.

  • Can you copy/paste the configuration(s) that you are having problems with?
    Have attached my graf + prometheus config files (oh - couldn’t attach, in full below - sorry!):

Prometheus.yml:

# my global config
global:
  scrape_interval: 15s # Set the scrape interval to every 15 seconds. Default is every 1 minute.
  evaluation_interval: 15s # Evaluate rules every 15 seconds. The default is every 1 minute.
  # scrape_timeout is set to the global default (10s).

# Alertmanager configuration
alerting:
  alertmanagers:
    - static_configs:
        - targets:
           - alertmanager:9093

# Load rules once and periodically evaluate them according to the global 'evaluation_interval'.
rule_files:
  # - "first_rules.yml"
  # - "second_rules.yml"

# A scrape configuration containing exactly one endpoint to scrape:
# Here it's Prometheus itself.

scrape_configs:
  # The job name is added as a label `job=<job_name>` to any timeseries scraped from this config.
  - job_name: "prometheus"

    # metrics_path defaults to '/metrics'
    # scheme defaults to 'http'.

    static_configs:
      - targets: ["localhost:9090"]
       # The label name is added as a label `label_name=<label_value>` to any timeseries scraped from this config.
        labels:
          app: "prometheus"
          
  - job_name: 'windows_exporter'
    scrape_interval: 1s
    static_configs:
      - targets: ['localhost:9182']

defaults.ini:

[can't include full file due to word limit, but only seciton changed:]
[dashboards]
# Number dashboard versions to keep (per dashboard). Default: 20, Minimum: 1
versions_to_keep = 20

# Minimum dashboard refresh interval. When set, this will restrict users to set the refresh interval of a dashboard lower than given interval. Per default this is 5 seconds.
# The interval string is a possibly signed sequence of decimal numbers, followed by a unit suffix (ms, s, m, h, d), e.g. 30s or 1m.
min_refresh_interval = 1s

# Path to the default home dashboard. If this value is empty, then Grafana uses StaticRootPath + "dashboards/home.json"
default_home_dashboard_path =

# Dashboards UIDs to report performance metrics for. * can be used to report metrics for all dashboards
dashboard_performance_metrics =