2 - Starting with WMI

Abstract

This chapter reviews Windows management instrumentation (WMI). It explains the basic foundation of WMI. Some of the WMI features available were used to illustrate the possibilities offered by this management instrumentation without programming. WMI refers to some standards defined by a committee called the distributed management task force (DMTF). The DMTF started many unifying management initiatives while focusing on distributed management. These initiatives are: desktop management interface (DMI), Web-based enterprise management (WBEM), common information model (CIM), directory-enabled networks (DEN), service incident standard (SIS) and solution exchange standard (SES), and alert standard forum (ASF). These components are themselves manageable in various ways. Although computers from various manufacturers may differ, they all have some common characteristics. Every computer has network devices, hard disks, controllers, tapes, memory, and processors, regardless of the manufacturer. In the same way, operating systems also have common characteristics, such as the memory available to run applications, the processes running, disk space available, users configured in the system, print queues and print jobs, and network adapters status.