Windows Container Monitoring Demystified: OpenTelemetry in Action - Ritika Gupta & Mansi Kulkarni

Description

Don't miss out! Join us at our next Flagship Conference: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon events in Amsterdam, The Netherlands (23-26 March, 2026). Connect with our current graduated, incubating, and sandbox projects as the community gathers to further the education and advancement of cloud native computing. Learn more at https://kubecon.io Windows Container Monitoring Demystified: OpenTelemetry in Action - Ritika Gupta, Oracle & Mansi Kulkarni, Red Hat Struggling to monitor and debug Windows containers on Kubernetes? You’re not alone! Unlike Linux, managing Windows workloads often feels like solving a puzzle with missing pieces. But it doesn’t have to be this way. In this talk, we will show you how to implement a complete monitoring stack using Windows exporter on a Windows node in Kubernetes. We will explore the metric collectors in Windows Exporter, their functionalities, and practical use. Next, we will deploy the Windows Exporter as a HostProcess pod, configuring a ServiceMonitor, and set up Prometheus to collect and visualize metrics. Building on these capabilities, we will integrate open source observability tooling using OpenTelemetry. You’ll learn how to set up the Otel Collector, configure it for Windows metrics, and forward them to your observability backend. Finally, we’ll elevate your debugging game by exploring the kubectl debug support for Windows nodes, enabling you to resolve issues faster at the node level.