Project Description

This project uses the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) API in order to explore the hardware items installed in a computer. It also allows to instantly query a set of performance counters in order to retrieve the current state of some hardware parameters.

Getting Started

The code is structured under the namespace SystemInfoExplorer. It is built into a dynamic link library (DLL) that can be added to any .net project.

Hardware Explorer

The library allows to explore the platform environment and the hardware installed into a computer by querying a subset of WMI classes. It returns information about the following items:

Item	Class	Corresponding WMI class	Description
CPU	CPUInfo	Win32_Processor	Provides information about an installed CPU
Memory bank	MemoryBankInfo	Win32_PhysicalMemory	Provides information about an individual memory bank
Memory	MemoryInfo	None	Uses the class MemoryBankInfo to provide insights about the overall installed memory
Video controller	VideoControllerInfo	Win32_VideoController	Provides information about an installed video controller
Disk partition	DiskPartition	Win32_DiskPartition	Provides information about an individual disk partition
Disk drive	DiskDriveInfo	Win32_DiskDrive	Provides information about an installed disk drive
Platform	PlatformInfo	None	Provides information about the operating system environment (e.g., OS, machine name, etc.)

Information from Available Performance Counters

The class QuickSystemStats allows to retrieve the current state of a subset of the system parameters (e.g., CPU usage, free memory size, etc.). The following table provides the list of the available parameters:

Parameter	Unit/Scale	Device	Description
CpuUsage	Percent (%)	CPU	The usage percentage of the CPU
ThreadCount	-	CPU	The number of threads
HandlesCount	-	CPU	the number of handles
CPUContextSwitches	switches/second	CPU	The number of CPU context switches per second
SystemCallsCount	calls/second	CPU	The number of system calls per second
TotalMemSize	MegaBytes	Memory	The total size of available memory
FreeMemSize	MegaBytes	Memory	The size of the free memory
MemUsagePercent	Percent (%)	Memory	The percentage of memory usage
BytesReadFromDisk	Bytes/second	Disk	The number of bytes read from disk per second
BytesWrittenToDisk	Bytes/second	Disk	The number of bytes written to disk per second
AvgTimeDiskReadPerSecond	-	Disk	The average reading operations from disk per second
AvgTimeDiskWritePerSecond	-	Disk	The average writing operations to disk per second

Usage

To explore the hardware installed on the computer, the class SystemInfoExplorer should be instantiated as follows:

// Add namespace to the C# file
using SystemInfoExplorer;

// Instantiate the explorer class
Explorer explorer = new Explorer();

// If the results logging is required, the file output should be enabled (disabled by default)
SystemInfoExplorer.Globals.Enable_File_Output = true;

// The default log filename is "devices.txt". It can be altered if required as follows:
SystemInfoExplorer.Globals.Output_Filename = filename;

// Invoke the run method to retrieve information from WMI structure (this may take few seconds)
explorer.Run();

To retrieve the current system state from the selected performace counters, the QuickSystemStats class can be used as follows:

// Instantiate the QuickSystemStats class
QuickSystemStats counters = new QuickSystemStats();

// Invoke the method GetStats() to retrieve the current system parameters
counters.GetStats();

// Use the overridden method ToString() to display / log the query results
Console.WriteLine($"{counters.ToString()}");

Deployment

To use the SystemInfoExplorer DLL, a reference should be added to the .net project.

Built With

• Microsoft Visual Studio - Microsoft Visual Studio
• .NET Framework 4.7 - .net framework

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.