Microsoft Windows Management Instrumentation (Wmi) Overview

What is WMI?

WMI was first released in 1998 as an additional component together with Windows NT 4.0 Service Pack 4. It is a core management support technology built in Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003 operating systems. Based on industry standards supervised by Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), WMI is a standard and basic structure, it allows you to access, configure, manage, and monitor almost all windows resources.

To understand the power and scope of WMI, you need to consider how to manage and monitor Windows workstations and servers in the past (or now. You may have used or are still using a number of graphical management tools to manage windows resources, such as disks, Event Logs, files, folders, file systems, network components, operating system settings, and performance data., printers, processes, registry settings, security, services, sharing, users, groups, and so on.

Even though graphical tools provide a functional management solution, what do they share? One answer is that before WMI, all Windows Graphical management tools were dependent on Win32 applications.ProgramApplication programming interfaces (APIS) to access and manage windows resources. Why? Before WMI, the only way to access windows resources programmatically is through the Win32 API. In this case, Windows Administrators cannot use common scripting languages to automate common system management tasks, because most scripting languages cannot directly call Win32 APIs. By providing consistent models and frameworks, WMI changes this situation-through models and frameworks, all windows resources are described and made public to the outside world. The best thing is that the system administrator can use the WMI script library to create system management scripts to manage any windows resources exposed Through WMI!

Use Windows Script Host and Microsoft Visual Basic Scripting Edition (VBScript), or any scripting language that supports COM automation (for example, ActivePerl of ActiveState Corporation ), you can write scripts to manage and automate the following aspects of your enterprise systems, applications, and networks:

•	Windows Server 2003,Windows XPProfessional Edition andWindows 2000System Management. You can write scripts to retrieve performance data, manage Event Logs, file systems, printers, processes, registry settings, schedulers, security, services, sharing, and many other operating system components and configuration settings.
•	Network Management. You can create a WMI-based script to manage network services, such as DNS, DHCP, and SNMP-enabled devices.
•	Real-time sound monitoring. You can writeCodeTo monitor and respond to Event Log items when an event occurs, and to monitor and respond to file system, registry modification, and other real-time OS changes. Basically, for WMI, what are the SNMP traps in the SNMP environment for WMI event subscription and notification.
•	Windows. netEnterprise Server Management. You can write scripts to manage Microsoft Application Center, Operations Manager, Systems Management Server, Internet Information Server, Exchange Server, and SQL Server.

For details, see:

WMI script entry: Part 1

WMI script entry: Part 2