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Using WMI with the .NET Framework

  • Article

WMI provides extensive instrumentation to accomplish almost any management task for many high-end applications (for example, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL Server, and Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS)). An administrator can perform the following tasks:

  • Monitor the health of the applications.
  • Detect bottlenecks or failures.
  • Manage and configure applications.
  • Query application data (use the traversal and querying of object relationships).
  • Perform seamless local or remote management operations.

The WMI architecture consists of the following three tiers:

  • Clients

    Software components that perform operations using WMI (for example, reading management details, configuring systems, and subscribing to events).

  • Object manager

    A broker between providers and clients that provides some key services, such as standard event publication and subscription, event filtering, query engine, and so on.

  • Providers

    Software components that capture and return live data to the client applications, process method invocations from the clients, and link the client to the infrastructure being managed.

The provision of data and events and the ability to configure systems are provided seamlessly to clients and applications through a well-defined schema. In the .NET Framework, the System.Management namespace provides common classes to traverse the WMI schema.

In addition to the .NET Framework, you need to have WMI installed on your computer in order to make use of the management features in this namespace. If you are using Windows Millennium Edition (Windows Me), Windows 2000 or Windows XP, WMI is already installed. Otherwise, you will need to download WMI from MSDN. 

See Also

Managing Applications Using WMI | Schemas | Queries | Management Events | System.Management and System.Management.Instrumentation Namespaces | Accessing Management Information with System.Management | Instrumenting .NET Framework Applications with System.Management | Browsing the WMI Schema