Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) consists of a set of extensions to the Windows Driver Model that provides an operating system interface through which instrumented components provide information and notification.
The major steps can be summarized as follows: Since the release of the first WMI implementation during the Windows NT 4.0 SP4 era (as an out-of-band download), Microsoft has consistently added WMI providers to Windows: Many customers have interpreted the growth in numbers of providers as a sign that WMI has become at Microsoft the "ubiquitous" management layer of Windows, even if Microsoft has never made this commitment explicit.
[citation needed] Beyond the scripting needs, most leading management-software packages, such as MOM, SCCM, ADS, HP OpenView for Windows (HPOV), BMC Software, and CA, Inc. are WMI-enabled and capable of consuming and providing WMI information through various user interfaces.
The extensions are part of the WDM architecture; however, they have broad utility and can be used with other types of drivers as well (such as SCSI and NDIS).
WMI extensions for WDM offer a set of Windows device driver interfaces for instrumenting data within the driver models native to Windows, so OEMs and IHVs can easily extend the instrumented data set and add value to a hardware/software solution.