How to use WMI To Get Information About Remote Computers

WMI is Microsoft's built-in system for managing and controlling remote computers and servers. This article explains how you can use a command-line interface to WMI to get information about a computer other than the one you are using.

Difficulty:

Moderate

Instructions

Things You'll Need

• Computer

1. Begin by clicking on start->run and typing CMD to open up a command line prompt. You can also find the command line prompt under Start->All Programs->Accessories.

2. In the black box that opens with the command line, type the following command: "wmic" (without the quotes) and press enter. This opens up the WMI runtime in which you can run commands.

3. Inside the WMIC command line, we need to specify the server we are going to be working on.

   Type the following command:

   /NODE:"servername or ip"

   And press enter. Replace servername or ip with the hostname of the computer you want to connect to, or its IP address. However, you should keep the quotes around the name or ip.

4. The above command tells WMI to connect to the specified computer. Now we can run WMI commands to get information from that computer.

   To see the programs running on the computer, type this command:
   process

   To see the services running on the computer, type this command:
   service

Tips & Warnings

• There are many more commands you can run within the WMI namespace. To get a list of those commands (or "aliases") type /? within the WMI command line.