Like most geeks, I like to know as much information as possible about my environment. Over time, and with experience you begin to learn which indicators about your environment are important to you.

In this case, I am speaking about my computers’ environment. And I have determined that for me to feel comfortable about the relative health of my system there are a few key indicators that I like to keep track of.

Windows Management Instrumentation or WMI for short, is a set of API’s, functions and scripts that allow you or a program to determine real time and static indicators about your system, or your entire network for that matter. WMI has allowed me to track either summary data or drill into the depths of my system to determine what exactly is happening.

A simple example that I use daily is a Yahoo Widget called Sys Monitor. Yahoo Widgets are small, typically single purpose, programs that are run by the Yahoo Widget engine. This engine was originally called Konfabulator but renamed when Yahoo bought it. The engine is basically a JavaScript runtime engine.

The Sys Monitor, as I have it configured, displays the current system up time, CPU and Memory load, Swap file usage and size, battery charge level, Wireless signal strength and SSID connected too, as well as the IP address both local and external. And hard drive size information as well as used vs. free.

These metrics are the ones of most interest to me. But the widget can display a number of others as well.

I use a number of other Widgets, but this particular one I use all the time, it’s small and sits quietly on the desktop so that I can tell at a glance how I am doing. It has often saved me from trying to download or copy files to a drive that was almost full, and has warned me when something was eating physical memory, or hogging the CPU.

Recommended.

Cheers,

Robert Porter