Another way to access performance information is via WMI. You can use either the WMI or the CIM cmdlets to access a large number of performance counters, as an alternative to using Get-Counter. The naming structure is different from using Get-Counter. With WMI, each counter is a separate WMI class.

With WMI, each performance counter set is a WMI class. The WMI performance counters are found in the ROOT\CimV2 namespace and have a name that begins with Win32_Perf. For example, the Memory performance counter set contains 36 separate counters. The WMI class Win32_PerfFormattedData_PerfOS_Memory contains 46 properties including all of the individual performance counters. With WMI, you get all the measurements back in one call to Get-CimInstance, whereas you would need to call Get-Counter for each sample. There are other ways to collect counters as shown in later recipes.

In this recipe, you get performance counters from local and remote machines using...