If you're anywhere in the Microsoft Windows space you've undoubtedly worked with Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI). WMI is one of those features of Windows that many technology professionals work with. Software developers create WMI providers so their applications can interact with WMI. On the flip side, IT pros use WMI and its providers to accomplish a wealth of tasks. WMI can be used to gather information about Windows, the hardware it's running on and the software that's installed. Through its methods, it can change a multitude of settings or even act as a built-in monitor always watching for various activities and triggering actions. WMI is very powerful. However, powerful products are never simple and WMI doesn't let us down there.
When using WMI it's important to understand how it works. You don't have to be a WMI professional, but you do need to understand how it's laid out and where to look. If you don't, you'll spend hours sifting through namespaces, classes, methods, and properties until your eyes roll back into your head. It can be a miserable experience.
Introducing Goverlan WMIX
There have been a few GUI tools come and go over the years, but none of the tools have been truly easy to use. Some are better than others but overall all of them simply didn't make WMI easy to understand. This is understandable. WMI has a lot of moving parts and it's hard to build a user interface to this beast that doesn't look like something out a Boeing 747's cockpit. However, I think that a tool by GoverLAN called WMIX has finally done it.
WMIX is the best way to explore WMI that I've seen. It has an elegant, modern interface and a "browser" view that allows the user to not just browse WMI namespaces and drill down into classes. It allows you to define "root objects" which can be WMI classes, associations or even queries. This gives you a dashboard to everything that WMI has to offer.
One of the features of the WMIX tool I also like is how much you can not only interact with WMI but also learn about WMI in the process. In this whitepaper, I'll go over some ways in which you can explore WMI using various methods and how WMIX can assist you in that endeavor.