Managing Windows with WMI

Abstract

Managing a large heterogeneous network has always been a formidable task. It is easy to manage a single program or a service running on the local machine using various automation interfaces such as PowerShell cmdlets, COM objects, or even .NET-based programmability. We get to the hard part when we throw distributed operations in the mix. What if the program we need to manage runs on a computer behind a firewall? What if it is not a program at all? It may be a hardware device such as a network router. This is where Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) can help us. WMI is a set of technologies that work together to provide uniform access to objects on a network. We can use it to query services for information, extract all sorts of data, trigger commands, and change configuration options.