Getting Windows Performance Counters Into InfluxDB and Grafana

I needed to get some Windows performance counters into InfluxDB, so I could setup some dashboards with Grafana. I’ve seen others post their default telegraf.conf files with the baseline CPU, Memory, Disk, etc … metrics. But I needed to track some non-default metrics. Like, “SQL Server Batch Requests/sec“. I started out writing my own powershell, parsing the data and sending an “Invoke-WebRequest” to my InfluxDB with Line Protocol data.

Then I realized, I could probably copy an existing [[inputs.win_perf_counters.object]] from the default telegraf.conf file. Then dig into Windows Performance Monitor to find the exact metric I need, and just switch the “ObjectName” and “Counters” out.

This is my example with Batch Requests/sec

• Open Windows Performance Monitor
• Click the green “+" button to add a counter

• Find the counter you want, in this case “SQLServer:SQL Statistics“
• Click the “upside down arrow” to the right
• Select “Batch Requests/sec“
• Click the “Add” button
• Click “OK” to close the window

• Verify you get the metrics you want
• Make a note of the “Counter“, “Instance“, and “Object” names

• Open your telegraf.conf file
• Under the “Inputs” sections, copy an existing “[[inputs.win_perf_counters.object]]” section
• Update “ObjectName” with the “Object” from Windows Performance Monitor
• Update “Counters“, with the “Counter” name from Windows Performance Monitor
• Update “Instances” with the instance name from Windows Performance Monitor. In this case “*” to choose All, since there is no specific name
• Update “Measurement” with a name for the collection you want to use in InfluxDB to store the metrics. For this example, “win_sql“

• Login to Grafana and add a new panel
• Select your measurement from the telegraf.conf file (win_sql)
• Select the Counter from the telegraf.conf file ,in the field box (Batch Requests/sec)