More on the Common Information Model

We have previously mentioned the CIM, or  Common Information Model, in the context of systems management standards. It is effectively an object-oriented schema for classifying objects pertaining to systems management. 

An example schema can be found here (note: there are multiple versions of the schema).

Notes from Microsoft Learn on this topic can be found in Microsoft's WMI SDK notes here.

From an organization perspective, the most important aspect is consistent adoption of a sufficiently descriptive data model, rather than the details of the data modelling itself.

Use wmic to debug printer status in cmd.exe

WMIC is Windows Management Instrumentation Command Line.  It is a command-line interface to WMI.

To use it to debug printer status on Windows, try the following in cmd.exe.

wmic printer get name, status

If status is Error this needs investigation.

Get-WmiObject

This is a cmdlet that makes calls into Windows Management Instrumentation, or WMI, objects. The alias gwmi can also be used.

WMIC - The "Instrumentation" Command Line

Ever heard to WMIC ("Wemmick")?  It is a great tool that can be used at the command prompt.

To view all the logical drives on a Windows machine you can do:

>wmic
wmic:root\cli> logicaldisk
wmic:root\cli> get caption

Will print out the caption column of the logicaldisk output.

Why WMI is cool

get mgmt data from remote computers