Querying WMI

Besides built-in support for performance counters, the Zabbix agent also supports WMI queries.

Note

Zabbix supports WMI through the Zabbix agent—remote WMI is not supported at this time.

To extract some useful information, we need a WMI query, and we might want to test the queries quickly—that can be done in Windows or by using the Zabbix agent. On the Windows side, the wbemtest.exe utility can be used. When launching it, click on Connect, accept the default namespace of root\cimv2, and click on Connect again. Then, in a dialog like this, click on Query:

You can enter complete queries here. For example, we could ask for the current time zone with a query:

SELECT StandardName FROM Win32_TimeZone

An alternative way to test such queries through the Zabbix agent would be with the zabbix_get utility, discussed in Chapter 3, Monitoring with Zabbix Agents and Basic Protocols.

With the query available, we can proceed with creating an item. Navigate to Configuration | Hosts, click on Items...