WMI is an acronym for Windows Management Instrumentation. WMI is the Microsoft's implementation of Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM) - a new management technology that allows software to monitor and control managed resources throughout the network. Such managed resources include hard drives, file systems, settings of operating system, processes, services, shares, registry settings, networking components, event logs, users, groups, etc.
WMI allows monitoring of performance counters as well.
