Know about Windows Management Instrumentation

In this article I will brief about Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), its purposes, how it works, steps to perform WMI operations and what are the benefits of WMI. I have also elaborated the steps of performing WBEMTEST with appropriate images wherever it was required.

Windows Management Instrumentation Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) is Windows operating system based technology that is used for retrieving management data from the local or remote machines in an enterprise. It works equally well for both local as well as remote machines. You can write your own programs or scripts to do daily scheduling of management jobs or activities. WMI can be used for only Window based operating systems like: Windows 2000 Windows 2003 Windows 2008 Windows Vista Windows XP SP2 WMI cannot be used for UNIX based operating systems like : UNIX, HP , AIX, Linux, Redhat, Solaris etc. Purpose of WMI WMI can be used to retrieve management and operational data from Window based computer systems. It is very useful for automating the administrative tasks involved in large organizations. The information retrieved from WMI scripts or Programs can be feed to other Applications or Products. One of the key features that make WMI very impressive is the fact that it enables you to manage data, get data and operate on remote machines as well. Things that can be done with WMI The capability of Windows Management Instrumentation to operate on the remote machine makes it very indispensable utility in anInformation Technology infrastructure. With the help of WMI utility we can perform following activities on a Window based operating system: We will be able to Start a new process or program on a remote computer We can set or schedule the time at which a particular process or program will run or execute We will be able to reboot a system from other computer We can retrieve the complete list of applications or programs installed on a local or remote machine We can fire queries on a local or remote machine to fetch events from Log files WMI gets information from the classes that are available on a particular system. Windows based computer systems have classes that are based on the Common Information Model (CIM): which is an extensible schema. Pre-requisites for WMI To execute WMI scripts on remote system appropriate permissions for the namespaces on that system are required. That means you need to have the administrative credentials of the system on which you want to perform WMI operations. If you do not have appropriate login credential then you will not be able to execute WMI operations. If you do not have enough permissions you will get the following error: " Access Denied" WMI Utilities and Operations The utilities provided by WMI platform are as below: WMIC : It is a command line utility WBEMTEST: It is Graphical User Interface for performing WMI operations on local and remote servers WBEMDump : it is also a command line utility available for WMI Interface Steps to perform WBEMTEST On the left hand corner of the Windows Machine you can find the Start button  Click on the "Run" option Type "wbemtest" Then press Enter and the following dialog box will open You can then press on the Connect button as shown in the image below Then the dialog box as shown below will appear, Provide information like Namespace, Username and Password as highlighted in the image below and press enter The following dialog box will appear. You can perform all the tasks listed in the Services Tab on the remote to which you have just connected Benefits of WMI The benefits of Windows Management Instrumentation can be listed below: It reduces the overhead of administrative tasks It automates the administrative tasks It provides an Interface for DCOM programmers and script writers It provides the feature to retrieve management data of remote computers The only disadvantage is that it is available for only Windows based operating systems.