Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) in SolarWinds Platform products

Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) is a proprietary technology used to poll performance and management information from Windows‑based network devices, applications, and components. When used as an alternative to SNMP, WMI can provide much of the same monitoring and management data currently available with SNMP‑based polling with the addition of Windows‑specific communications and security features. For more information about WMI, see Microsoft's MSDN.

Due to specific characteristics of WMI polling requests, polling a single WMI‑enabled object uses approximately five times the resources required to poll the same or similar object with SNMP on the same polling frequency.