Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) is one of those technologies that tends to intimidate administrators who are unfamiliar with it. On the Performance team, we handle basic WMI issues - mainly relating to basic WMI functionality and permissions. So today, we're going to go over the WMI Basics. We're not really going to get into how to write WMI scripts - there's hundreds of online scripting resources and books available already. We are going to look at the architecture of WMI itself ...
So - what is WMI? WMI is an implementation of the Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM) standard. WMI provides a uniform access mechanism to a vast collection of Windows management data and methods. WMI offers access to this information via script, C++ programming interfaces, dot net classes (system.management), and a command line tool (WMIC). Other WMI capabilities also include eventing, remoting, query, views, user extensions to schema and instrumentation, and more.
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