Monitoring WMI Data With VbScript

by Warren Gaebel | Nov 30, 2011

If you know Visual Basic and WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation), Hovhannes Avoyan’s article, How to Monitor Windows Servers with VBScript, WMI, and Paid Monitor, on the Paid Monitor blog is well worth a read.  It is a well-written article that shows how to monitor WMI data from the cloud.  All the VB code is included.

The same article is helpful to those who do not know Visual Basic because it illustrates the concepts behind creating and populating a WMI monitor from within a computer program.  Fortunately, the WMI API is available for many languages, so applying the concepts presented in the article to your language of choice isn’t much of a stretch.

If you do not know about WMI, let me gently nudge you in that direction.  It provides a wealth of useful information about hardware, software, networking, security, services, events, users, and much more.  For security purposes, you can monitor changes to the hardware, attached devices, user accounts, the registry, access controls, or security settings.  For performance purposes, you can monitor paging, any of the performance counters, and available memory, disk space, or quota.  For availability purposes, you can monitor CPU temperature, power failures, and page file size.  You can even trace processes and threads as they start and stop.  These examples are not exhaustive, but I’m sure they’ll give you a few ideas.

Whether your concern is security, performance, or availability, WMI data can (and should) be monitored.  Microsoft has more information about WMI, and Hovhannes’ article is a step-by-step guide that shows how to access the WMI data and send it to a Paid Monitor monitor on a regular basis.  Once there, of course, it’s a trivial matter to pull up the charts and reports.  You can also have notifications sent to you if the data goes outside the range you specify.

I especially like the skeleton code used in this article.  After the initial copy and paste, very few edits are needed to get it up and running.  It is open source code available on GitHub, so there are no copyright issues.  The article adds an explanation and walkthrough to help you get up and running even faster.

If you want the Paid Monitor visualization, tracking, and alerting applied to Windows’ system data, it’s good to know it’s possible, but it’s also good to know how easy it can be.  Don’t believe me?  Check out the article and see for yourself.

If you would like to test drive the code in the subject article, Paid Monitor offers a 15 day free trial at https://www.monitor.us/free_signup.jsp. This is your opportunity to see how easy it can be.