Diving Into WMI...

[SlightlyLoony]

The other day, one of our customers asked me "What the heck is this WMI stuff you keep blathering about?" To someone like me who's been working in the dark and dusty recesses of major operating systems for the past few decades, the answer is obvious. I asked my wife (who is about as ungeeky as you can get, unless you're into canine agility) if she knew what WMI was. Her response: "Sure! It's World of Monkey Island!" Er, no...that wasn't quite what I had in mind!

So here's a bit more about the WMI I've been blathering about, which is otherwise known as Windows Management Instrumentation. WMI's basic purpose is to provide a way for management applications to explore, monitor, and control Windows operating systems and the applications running on them. Our Discovery application is exactly such a management application, and it uses WMI to explore and monitor Windows systems.

WMI is a Microsoft technology, implemented in every version of Windows since Windows 2000 (and probably before then as well). It's also implemented by many applications, both Microsoft and independent. The Microsoft propaganda can be found here and here.

WMI is actually Microsoft's implementation of the industry standard WBEM (Web-Based Enterprise Management). WBEM is a standard of DTMF (the Distributed Management Task Force), and it has been implemented by many leading OS vendors, including Microsoft, Novell, Solaris, and Red Hat.