Troubleshooting WMI Issues

Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) is, essentially, a standardized mechanism for gaining data via a common "API" as called for by the Distributed Management Task Force.

Intermittently corruption will be found within the WMI infrastructure. This can be either due to corruption of the built-in WMI classes, or due to a third party WMI provider becoming corrupted or improperly uninstalled.

Overviews of the WMI systems can be found at the following sites, and many others:

• https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa384642(v=vs.85).aspx
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Management_Instrumentation

Microsoft provides a tool to diagnose WMI issues in detail. As a service to subscribers, Watchman Monitoring provides a copy of this script within the agent's Utilities folder.

To get detailed information on the WMI issues, run the following .vbs script administrative privilages:

32 bit systems

cscript.exe "C:\Program Files\Monitoring Client\utilities\WMIDiag.vbs"

64 bit systems:

cscript.exe "C:\Program Files (x86)\Monitoring Client\utilities\WMIDiag.vbs"

The tool will return details at the command prompt and/or open a window with additional details.

Note: the winmgmt tool is known to miss deep or subtle corruption issues.

Resolving the underlying corruption of WMI classes is outside the scope of Watchman Monitoring's support, however, the following articles contain troubleshooting and resolution steps:

• http://blogs.technet.com/b/askperf/archive/2014/08/08/wmi-repository-corruption-or-not.aspx
• http://kb.paessler.com/en/topic/1043-my-wmi-sensors-don-t-work-what-can-i-do