Monitoring critical Windows services and processes is important to ensure your applications and infrastructure remain healthy. In this blog, I’ll show how to monitor Windows service status (Running/Stopped) using Windows Exporter, Prometheus, and Grafana.
This setup allows you to quickly identify stopped services and visualize their status in a Grafana dashboard.
Prerequisites
Before starting, make sure you have:
- Windows Exporter installed on the Windows server
- Prometheus configured to scrape Windows Exporter metrics
- Grafana connected to Prometheus as a data source
Step 1: Verify Windows Service Metrics
Windows Exporter exposes service information through the metric:
You can verify the metric in Prometheus:
windows_service_state
The metric returns service details along with labels such as:
• name
• state
• instance
• job
Step 2: Create a Table Panel in Grafana
- Open Grafana.
- Create a new dashboard.
- Add a new panel.
- Select Table visualization.
- Choose Prometheus as the data source.
Step 3: Add the PromQL Query
Use the following query to display selected Windows services:
windows_service_state(
name=~“.*grafana.*|prometheus|.*OpenOpcUaCoreServer.*|.*postgresql.*|.*timescaledb.*|.*pgagent.*|.*windows_exporter.*|.*promtail.*”,
instance=“$instance”
)
You can modify the service names according to your environment.
Step 4: Filter Unwanted Results
The metric returns multiple states for each service.
Add the following transformation:
This makes the table cleaner and easier to read.
Step 7: Configure Value Mappings
To improve readability, configure value mappings for the State column.
Final Result
Your table will display:
The color-coded status immediately highlights any stopped service.
Benefits of This Approach
• Monitor critical Windows services in real time
• Quickly identify stopped services
• Centralized visibility in Grafana
• Easy to customize for any Windows application
• Can be extended with Grafana alerts for automatic notifications
Conclusion
Using Windows Exporter, Prometheus, and Grafana, you can build a simple but effective dashboard to monitor Windows service status. By combining PromQL queries, transformations, and value mappings, Grafana can display a clean service health table that helps administrators quickly identify issues before they impact users.
If you’re already using Grafana for infrastructure monitoring, this is a great addition to your Windows monitoring dashboards.