This book helps developers and system administrators understand Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI). For the first time the Windows Operating System employs a unified technology to represent software and hardware management. The power of WMI in systems management stretches to virtually every piece of software and hardware. So regardless of whether you're a team leader, software engineer or system administrator, WMI will probably affect you.

After the introduction, the book starts covering where management technologies/frameworks were (SNMP and DMI) and roughly how they worked and the differences between them. This leads to the reasons why the Desktop Management Task Force (DMTF) defined a protocol/schema called WBEM (Web Based Enterprise Management). Microsoft adopted WBEM and WMI was born. WMI is an implementation of the WBEM standard and it is also consistent with Microsoft's Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) initiative. The book continues to explain how to understand the various class schemas and the WMI tools provided by Microsoft. The class schemas describe virtually every aspect of a network, computer and its operating system together with the installed software. The book then introduces how WMI fits together with all its different building blocks.

From a development point of view, the most important place to start in making your own software/hardware manageable through a standard management environment is learning how to develop a class schema. The book takes a whole two chapters to discuss how to do this.

Accessing the WMI management environment can be achieved a number of ways. The book covers how system administrators can develop script to access and manipulate the management environment. The next part of the book is then focused on how developers can use and access the management environment through both the C++/COM interface and the .net framework. A chapter is also included how application developers can develop their UI management tools for the Microsoft Management Console (MMC). A crucial chapter in the book describes how software and hardware developers can write their own WMI providers. WMI providers are the gateway for developers to expose their own class schema.

Finally, the book covers a very little-known subject of the WMI toolset called Event Tracing. Event Tracing is a very powerful and high performance method of instrumenting applications. It allows applications to expose very detailed information about an operation or task. The operating system uses this technology to expose activity in the Windows kernel, security subsystems and numerous other subsystems.