What is Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI)?

Windows Management Instrumentation or WMI is a new way to both get information the operating system, hardware, components and software and manage it using a common interface.

For example, if you need to query system information or manage Windows components programmatically, WMI provides a unified interface. You can use both a graphical user interface, but also a command line tool WMIC.

From the command line, you can use the WMIC tool like this:

wmic os get Caption,Version

wmic process list brief

These two commands return basic information about the operating system and running processes.

WMI queries can use a SQL-like syntax called WQL. For example:

wmic process where "name='notepad.exe'" get ProcessId

This retrieves the process id of Notepad if it is running.

For scripting, WMI is available through COM interfaces. Here is a short example using VBScript:

Set svc = GetObject("winmgmts:\\.\root\cimv2")

Set col = svc.ExecQuery("SELECT * FROM Win32_OperatingSystem")


For Each obj In col

  WScript.Echo obj.Caption & " " & obj.Version
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