Active Directory, 3rd Edition

Chapter 29. Scripting with WMI

The Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) API was developed by Microsoft in 1998 in response to the ever-growing need for developers and system administrators to have a common, scriptable API to manage the components of the Windows operating systems. Before WMI, if you wanted to manage some component of the operating system, you had to resort to using one of the component-specific Win32 API's, such as the Registry API or Event Log API. Each API typically had its own implementation quirks and required way too much work to do simple tasks. The other big problem with the Win32 APIs was that Microsoft's scripting languages such as VBScript could not use them. This really limited how much an inexperienced programmer or system administrator could do to programmatically manage systems. WMI changes all this by providing a single API that can be used to query and manage the Event Log, the Registry, processes, the filesystem, or any other operating system component.

So you may be wondering at this point: this is a book on Active Directory, so why do I need to care about a system management API? Even if your sole job in life is to manage Active Directory, WMI can benefit you in at least two ways. First, Active Directory runs on top of Windows 2000 or Windows Server 2003. These servers need to be managed (i.e., Event Log settings configured, Registry modified, applications installed, etc.) and monitored (i.e., filesystem space, services running, etc.). You can ...