Is there something like WMI for Linux?

Question

I like the whole WMI concept, and I could really make use of it under Linux (in some scripts). Is there something like that for Linux systems?

Answer 1

Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) is Microsoft's implementation of the WBEM (Web Based Enterprise Management) standard from the Distributed Management Task Force. These standards are available and used in several flavors of *nix systems. Just as an example, here is a SourceForge project that enables WBEM on Linux systems. There is a standard called CIM (Common Information Model) which is described by the DTMF as follows:

CIM provides a common definition of management information for systems, networks, applications and services, and allows for vendor extensions. CIM's common definitions enable vendors to exchange semantically rich management information between systems throughout the network.

Answer 2

Not really. Are you using WMI to get system parameters, or to query processes, or to change configuration, or monitor for system events, or what?

The kernel exposes a lot of information and tunable knobs via the /proc and /sys filesystems. No query language, just a organized hierarchy of directories and files. Some of these files are read-only, read-write, or write-only; some of them are pollable.

Some services may have custom clients to query and update configuration on the fly -- chrony's chronyc comes to mind, but even the very most basic init has initctl. Newer services like HAL can be introspected and manipulated over D-Bus.