Problem Statement

Environment

• Agent: Alloy v1.10.1
• Embedded exporter: windows_exporter v0.30.8
• OS: Windows Server 2022 on Azure Virtual Machine Scale Set (target host)
• Alloy+windows_exporter for scraping, Grafana for visualization

Problem

We’re seeing intermittent, single-scrape drops to 0 or a small fixed value (e.g. 3396) in metrics that should be monotonic counters. Immediately before/after, the series resumes at the great-or-equal expected value.

This occurs across multiple per-process counters, for example:

• windows_process_page_faults_total (see screenshot below)
• windows_process_cpu_time_total

What we know

• The PID label remains constant across the dips — so it is not a process restart.
• The dips are one scrape wide (… → high → 0/3396 → high …).
• We also see scrape gaps (e.g. 10:08–10:15) but those are distinct from the spurious values. (honestly, less concerned about gaps at this point)
• Multiple different windows_process_* metrics are affected, not just one.

Questions

1. Is it expected for the exporter to emit bad samples? Or am I somehow misinterpreting the data?
2. Are there additional steps that I could take to troubleshoot this issue? What might you suggest?

Screenshot with Dips

Environment

• windows_exporter Version: v0.30.8 (based on inspecting Alloy Agent v1.10.1 go.sum file)
• Windows Server Version: 2022