Get total memory on Windows

[emexelem]

I'm trying to figure out how we can get directly or compute the total memory available on a Windows system.
I'm using the default configuration for Windows and enabled inputs.win_perf_counters.object.IncludeTotal but could not find how to get this information.

[kerams]

There does not appear to be an easy way to do that (https://serverfault.com/a/377941/188824).

Also, setting IncludeTotal to true has no effect here because none of the counters in the Memory category have any instances at all, let alone any called _Total.

[danielnelson]

Does the mem plugin do this correctly on Windows?

[[inputs.mem]]
  # no configuration

[kerams]

Hm, for some reason I thought inputs.mem did not work on Windows. You're right though, it does report the correct total.

[emexelem]

inputs.mem makes use of WMI, which has wmic ComputerSystem get TotalPhysicalMemory but according to the comments in the config file

# These are the recommended method of monitoring system metrics on windows,
# as the regular system plugins (inputs.cpu, inputs.mem, etc.) rely on WMI,
# which utilize more system resources.```

[danielnelson]

I think I will close this issue, we could open another if there is another option for getting this information. I'd be interested to hear how well the plugin works in practice for you though.

[eclements]

@danielnelson I also came across this problem today for windows monitoring with Telegraf + perfmon collectors. I can only report "available memory" but not what the total memory on the server is, or what percentage of total memory is free. Any suggestions? I also can't seem to show accurately the total memory used... in my case I have 160GB ram, with 100GB of memory usage not showing, but I can see there is 60GB free in the graph but no way to show that 100GB is in use.

[danielnelson]

Give the mem input a second try, it no longer uses WMI and should be more suitable for use.