Systems administrators are well aware of the many technologies available for monitoring and maintaining the machines on their networks. Unfortunately, Windows doesn't offer a built-in solution that reacts to specific system events (e.g., by sending an email alert or a page). There are, however, complete end-to-end solutions that monitor and respond to events on networked machines. Although such tools are powerful, they can be quite expensive, particularly for low-budget shops.
But the Windows platform does provide system components that let administrators easily write code to enable event response and don't require a large investment. One of the most flexible technologies with such capabilities is Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI).
WMI
In previous articles, I've discussed the use of WMI to enumerate lists of devices and properties—for example, listing all the drives on a machine.WMI classes enable this kind of functionality. Anyone with an Object Oriented Programming (OOP) background—using such languages as C++, C#, and Perl—knows that a class is a collection of properties and functions. . . .
