How to Specify WMI Information

To make additions or changes to WMI properties, you should be familiar with how to use WMI settings. For general information on WMI and what WMI properties may be gathered, search the Microsoft website for "WMI".

Cherwell Asset Management also provides syntax for further qualifying how certain WMI properties are gathered. For more information, search the Microsoft website for “Windows Management Instrumentation Query Language (WQL)".

You might find the following example useful in getting started with entering WMI information in Cherwell Asset Management. You can adjust your entries according to your needs. This example shows how you would complete the fields in the New/Change Custom Machine Property dialog box if you wanted to gather MAC addresses for machines with an adapter type of Ethernet 802.3, and only receive back only the values that begin with 00.

To gather the above information, you would first select WMI in the New/Change Custom Machine Property dialog box, and then complete the fields as follows. (The fields are listed first, followed by the entry you would make.)

• WMI class: Win32_NetworkAdapter
• WMI property: Name
• Description: (optional)
• Where clause: AdapterType="Ethernet 802.3" AND MACAddress LIKE "00%"

This brings back the names of all adapters where the adapter type is Ethernet 802.3 with a MAC address that starts at 00.

Alternatively, if you know you have a MAC Address commonly found on machines that you want to exclude (example: one starting with 42), you could modify the Where clause as follows:

Where clause: AdapterType="Ethernet 802.3" AND MACAddress LIKE "[^42]%"