Chapter 17. Understanding WMI

IN THIS CHAPTER

You've no doubt heard about Windows Management Instrumentation and how it's the holy grail of systems administration. You may have even looked into it and realized how complicated it appears to be! WMI is a powerful tool, but I'll show you that it's not as complicated as it appears.

Whenever I speak at conferences, I'm nearly always asked about Windows Management Instrumentation, or WMI. WMI first caught on in Windows 2000 (although it's partially supported in Windows NT 4.0), and administrators have been hearing about how wonderful a tool it is for managing systems, especially through scripting. Unfortunately, WMI is also one of the most complex-looking technologies to have come out of Redmond in a long time, and many administrators are justifiably concerned about having to spend the rest of their lives understanding it. In this chapter and the two that follow, however, I'm going to show you that WMI isn't as complicated as it looks. In fact, I'll even provide you with some code templates that you can modify to query or set almost any kind of management information from a Windows computer.