Simon Krenger

One excellent tool for Systems Management on Windows is the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), which allows you to remotely execute commands and query parameters on a Windows Host. Of course, all modern Windows systems have the WMI Client installed, but what about the Linux clients?

To get the same functionality on a Linux system (I am using Debian in this example), we need to get the following two packages from this website:

• libwmiclient1_1.3.14-3_amd64.deb
• wmi-client_1.3.14-3_amd64.deb

Make sure you get the correct packages for your architecture and Linux distribution. Then install these two packages like so:

root@qcore:~# dpkg -i libwmiclient1_1.3.14-3_amd64.deb
root@qcore:~# dpkg -i wmi-client_1.3.14-3_amd64.deb

Now we are ready to go. The following example shows how to get the size of the WorkingSet of the process “java.exe” running on the remote host 192.168.20.20:

wmic -U Administrator%mysecret //192.168.20.20 "Select WorkingSetSize from Win32_Process Where CommandLine like '%java.exe%'"

Update: I added a set of examples here.

I really like the SQL-like syntax (they call it WQL) and the fact that you can query virtually any parameter of a Windows host. In the future, I might create another post with my Nagios scripts that use WMI for monitoring. For other examples and the documentation of WMI, refer to the corresponding Microsoft TechNet site.