Introduction

Management of computer environment is typically not a very easy task, yet being crucial for the succesful operation of your business.

WMI Architecture

Microsoft® Windows® Management Instrumentation (WMI) is a technology for accessing management information in enterprise environments.

Using it, you can either locally or remotely obtain management data from computer systems running the Windows® operating system, ranging

from simple data such as CPU usage and memory consumption to highly-specialized data such as the mainboard model.

A public standard known as the Common Infomation Model (CIM) is used by WMI to store data. The CIM is an object-oriented data model used

to describe an enterprise. The basic entity in the CIM is a class. CIM classes represent managed objects, such as applications, hard disk drives or

mainboards. Each class publishes properties, describing data related to the object represented by it. For example, the Win32_OperatingSystem

class represents the active operating system on the machine and contains, among others, a property called LastBootUpTime, which indicates the

date and time the operating system was last booted.

Classes, however, are only type descriptions. The Win32_OperatingSystem, just describes what properties an object representing an operating

system should have. To actually read data regarding the operating system, you need an instance of the Win32_OperatingSystem class, i.e., an

object which has properties as described by that class.

For some classes, there is tipically only one instance. The Win32_OperatingSystem we have used as example above is one of such classes, as there

is only one operating system active on the machine at a time. For some other classes, there can be more than one instance.

Win32_PerfFormattedData_PerfDisk_LogicalDisk is a typical example of such a class. It represents logical disk partitions, so there are instances

for each of the available partitions (C:, D:, etc.), as well as an instance that gathers data from all the partitions at the same time.