What is WMI? A new German car brand, poised to break the pockets of wealthy parents in their mid-fifties crisis?

The split of one of the brothers of Warner Brothers for a fight in the last family meal?

Something related to home automation and that effort of technology to make our houses as computerized as they are not very homely?

A computer move that we had not heard of until today or if we had done it was to nod without having a clue what it really is about? Well, rather the latter!

For this reason, and because we like to explore the vast fields of knowledge, we are going to try an approach to the transcendental question: What is WMI? There are people out there who do not have the urgent need to master the concept, taxi drivers or taxidermists for example, but there are other brave people who will live much better with the knowledge of these skills. Today goes for them: What is WMI?

What is WMI? A basic approach to the concept

WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) is a technological invention of Microsoft, whose purpose is to take care of the different operational environments of Windows.

The Windows Management Toolkit (WMI) consists of a set of extensions of Windows Driver Model, which provide an operating system interface so that its components give us information and different types of notifications.

WMI is Microsoft’s implementation of web-based business management standards (WBEM), the common information model (CIM) and the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF).

WMI allows script languages (such as VBScript or Windows PowerShell) to manage Microsoft Windows personal computers and servers, both locally and remotely. WMI comes pre-installed on Windows 2000 and Microsoft’s newest operating systems. It is also available as a download for Windows NT, Windows 95 and Windows 98.

Microsoft, also provides a command line interface for WMI called Windows Management Instrumentation Command-line (WMIC).

What can we do about WMI?

Now that we’ve assimilated and internalized what WMI is, let’s go with a few easy things we can use it for.

As we have mentioned, through WMI it will be easy to manage both immediate and remote computers, being able to program processes that will be executed in indicated and chosen moments; to initiate it and to begin to operate in a remote computer; also to restart them from a distance, if it is necessary; to obtain lists of the applications that are installed in our computer, the rest of local computers and also the remote ones; to inform us of the registers of events of Windows, in the local computers as in the remote ones…

You need to know that since WMI comes with a set of ready-to-use automation interfaces, all administration functions supported by a WMI provider and its set of classes are supported by scripts for immediate and free use. Beyond WMI class design and vendor development, Microsoft’s development and testing teams are not required to create, validate, and test a scripting model, since it is, in fact, available in WMI.

In fact, nowadays you can use something more advanced…

Using monitoring software so powerful, it works for 1 computer or 10,000.

And you can use it for free. Shall I tell you how?

Purposes of WMI

We can consider that the purpose of WMI is to define a set of specifications independent of the environment, which allow sharing management information between the same management applications.

WMI prescribes enterprise management standards and related technologies for Windows that work with existing management standards. Like the Desktop Management Interface (DMI) and SNMP, WMI complements these standards by providing a uniform model. This model represents the environment through which management data from any source can be accessed in a common way.

Let’s try to simplify it. WMI operates, more or less, as a database would do; it offers you a large and varied information, which will be most useful for monitoring systems that are based on Windows.

Imagine yourself in front of an instrument control panel. You have all the necessary access to its parts and you can be observing the levels that match the most personal variables of a computer running in a Microsoft Windows environment. WMI uses its language to give us representative samples of the functioning of systems, applications, networks, different devices, etc..

If you are interested in WMI, you will also be interested in…

By the way do you know who does it like no one else and is a champion when it comes to monitoring? Pandora FMS, a flexible monitoring system, capable of monitoring devices, infrastructures, applications, services and business processes.

For example, in the following video you can see how to create and configure a WMI module remotely in Pandora FMS:

Do you want to know much more about Pandora FMS? Click here: https://pandorafms.com/

Or if you have to monitor more than 100 devices you can also enjoy a 30 days FREE DEMO of Pandora FMS Enterprise. Get it here.

The Pandora FMS team will be delighted to assist you!

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