Around 2 1/2 years ago, I wrote a blog item entitled Discovering Networking with Monad and MSH where I looked at some aspects of WMI and how to discover more. Since then, I’ve published a few more articles on WMI.
The key thing for IT Pros to understand is that WMI is both a friend and other folks’ friend. What I meant by that is that WMI was built to be an interface. And for Microsoft, that means developer focused. WMI was the way for one application to surface management information and for other applications to leverage that information. This enables tools such as SCCM (aka SMS) to do such cool things.
But with PowerShell, the various classes of information are but a simple command away. The key is the GET-WmiObject cmdlet. This cmdlet enables you to retrieve any WMI class and access both its properties and methods and that means considerable power. PowerShell also provides WMI type accelerators, such as [WMI] that further simplify the use of WMI.
So how does an IT Pro get started. The first thing, I suppose is to understand how WMI is structured. To simplify, WMI is implemented on a host. On that host, there is a set of information that is organised with a hierarchical namespace which breaks up the information in a structured manner. In each Node of the WMI namespace, you’ll find a number of classes. Each class has a definition (what it should/can contain) and instances. Each instance of a class represents a real-world occurrence of that object. The class and hence the instance contains properties and methods. You can use the properties for reporting and can also update the values of these properties for any instance (and create and manipulate new instances). Instances (and the class) contain methods that you can call to get an instance to do something. The details of the namespaces, classes, properties and methods are described on MSDN.
With PowerShell, however the best place to start is with MOW’s most excellent WMI Explorer. This tool is incredibly cool. First, because it’s written all in PowerShell, but more importantly, because it’s the best browser I’ve seen. It’s a big PowerShell script – when you run it, you can open WMI on a system and browse the namespaces. In each namespace node you can look at the classes in that node. And for each class, you can simply see both the existing instances as well as the definition of that class. Here’s a screen shot of this tool running on one of my workstations:
As an IT Pro, you should download WMI Explorer and explore. I’ll be posting more on WMI and PowerShell coming up.
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