Technical Preview
windows_exporter is undergoing a modernization. We plan to deliver a stable release by mid-2025, with upcoming changes—including a newly designed Hyper-V collector—adding value to the official 1.0 stable release.
Windows Management Infrastructure (MI) as a Replacement for Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI)
As of version 0.30.0, windows_exporter no longer uses WMI directly. Instead, it utilizes its successor, Windows Management Infrastructure (MI), available since Windows Server 2012. MI offers several advantages, such as the ability to run queries in parallel.
Performance Data Helpers
windows_exporter 0.30 uses Performance Data Helpers instead grab and parse the binary data from the registry. This change also introduces support for Process V2, which is enabled by default on Windows Server 2022. In conclusion, the code from https://github.com/leoluk/perflib_exporter is removed.
💥 Breaking Changes
windows_exporter introduced an other wave of breaking changes. Sorry for that! The reason is that there is not enough maintainer capacity to hold backwards compatibility. Keep in mind, windows_exporter is using semver as versioning strategy and below version 1, backwards compatibility is not necessary.
On plan, this might be the last wave of breaking changes. All modernization steps are done and we are now looking for a stabilization and bugfixes phrase for now.
What's Changed
💥 Breaking Changes
- *: replace
--collectors.[name].*with--collector.[name].*flags (click PR number for more information) by @jkroepke in #1659 - *: Remove
teradici_pcoipandvmware_blastcollector by @jkroepke in #1686 - logon: BREAKING: replace wmi query by Win32 API calls and expose detailed logon sessions. (click PR for more information) by @jkroepke in #1687
- chore: Switch to hostprocess base image and add support for Windows Server 2025 on Kubernetes (click PR number for more information) by @jkroepke in #1731
- pagefile: BREAKING: move paging metrics from os to dedicated collector (click PR for more information) by @jkroepke in #1735
- chore: Remove registry based perfdata collector by @jkroepke in #1742
✨ Exciting New Features
- updates: add windows update collector by @jkroepke in #1652
- tcp: use GetExtendedTcpTable to display states Closed, Listening, SynSent, SynRcvd, CloseWait, TimeWait ... by @astigmata in #1638
- net: expose network interfaces address by @jkroepke in #1635
- chore: Move private packages to internal by @jkroepke in #1664
- process: Implement PDH collector and add support for Process V2 by @jkroepke in #1666
- exchange: Use new collector interface by @jkroepke in #1685
- mi: replace all WMI calls with MI calls by @jkroepke in #1714
- feat: add perfcounter.engine CLI option as alternative to WINDOWS_EXPORTER_PERF_COUNTERS_ENGINE env by @jkroepke in #1723
- udp: Added UDP collector by @jkroepke in #1725
- vmware: refactor collector by @jkroepke in #1727
- time: refactor collector by @jkroepke in #1728
- terminal_services: refactor collector by @jkroepke in #1729
- system: refactor collector by @jkroepke in #1730
- physical_disk: refactor collector by @jkroepke in #1734
- remote_fx: refactor collector by @jkroepke in #1738
- smtp: refactor collector by @jkroepke in #1739
- smb: refactor collector by @jkroepke in #1740
- service: parallelize api calls by @jkroepke in #1744
🐞 Bug Fixes
- scheduled_task: fix memory leaks by @jkroepke in #1649
- collector: add stack trace, if collector panics by @jkroepke in #1650
- initiate: fix Cannot create another system semaphore error by @jkroepke in #1653
- initiate: close event log handle by @jkroepke in #1654
- cpu: add workaround for counter resets related to
% Processor Utilitymetric by @jkroepke in #1637 - *: don't exclude resources, if empty exclude is empty. by @jkroepke in #1680
- update: rename
updatescollector toupdateby @jkroepke in #1692 - fix: fail, if unknown collector is defined in enabled list by @jkroepke in #1693
- tcp: fix panic on collector by @jkroepke in #1699
🛠️ Dependencies
- chore(deps): bump golang.org/x/sys from 0.25.0 to 0.26.0 by @dependabot in #1675
- chore(deps): bump github.com/prometheus/common from 0.59.2-0.20240918152650-14bac55a992f to 0.60.0 by @dependabot in #1674
- chore(deps): bump github.com/bmatcuk/doublestar/v4 from 4.6.1 to 4.7.1 by @dependabot in #1689
- chore(deps): bump github.com/prometheus/client_golang from 1.20.4 to 1.20.5 by @dependabot in #1701
- chore(deps): bump github.com/prometheus/common from 0.60.0 to 0.60.1 by @dependabot in #1708
- chore(deps): bump github.com/Microsoft/hcsshim from 0.12.7 to 0.12.8 by @dependabot in #1707
- chore(deps): bump github.com/prometheus/exporter-toolkit from 0.13.0 to 0.13.1 by @dependabot in #1717
- chore(deps): bump github.com/Microsoft/hcsshim from 0.12.8 to 0.12.9 by @dependabot in #1716
- chore(deps): bump golang.org/x/sys from 0.26.0 to 0.27.0 by @dependabot in #1724
📖 Documentation
- docs: fix link to update collector by @ehrenfeu in #1682
- docs: add actual Windows Update service name by @ehrenfeu in #1690
- docs: Add log.file argument to README by @PolygonError in #1702
- docs: Update textfile collector defaults inclusion by @yangskyboxlabs in #1722
Other Changes
New Contributors
- @astigmata made their first contribution in #1638
- @ehrenfeu made their first contribution in #1682
- @PolygonError made their first contribution in #1702
- @yangskyboxlabs made their first contribution in #1722
Full Changelog: v0.29.2...v0.30.0-beta.2