5 ms·

Hey, Mike Arpaia here. You're totally right in that the SQL interface is very similar to WMI. Some core differences with osquery are: - it's cross platform and

by marpaia 12y ago

Hey, Mike Arpaia here. You're totally right in that the SQL interface is very similar to WMI. Some core differences with osquery are: - it's cross platform and supports many *nix operating systems - adding new tables is very well supported via a simple API: https://github.com/facebook/osquery/wiki/creating-a-new-table https://github.com/facebook/osquery/wiki/creating-a-new-tabl... - several tools and utilities exist to leverage the power of SQL at scale (osqueryd is a full operating system instrumentation tool which allows you to use SQL to instrument your whole infra): https://github.com/facebook/osquery/wiki/using-osqueryd https://github.com/facebook/osquery/wiki/using-osqueryd All in all, WMI is great, no doubt about it, but osquery has a few unique features which make it a cool, interesting product that you can use all across you internal infrastructure.

MrBuddyCasino 12y ago
Didn't want to give off a "someones been there and has done that already" vibe, your version definitely looks much better. Honestly, I found WMI to be lacking and also to be quite slow. Great to have a better alternative for unixes!
- marpaia 12y ago
  Of course, it's an intuitive comparison to make. I'm glad you like it! I'm looking forward to working with you and similarly insightful community members on improving osquery for everyone :)
  - pstuart 12y ago
    Federated queries across machines would be quite cool.
    - jamii 12y ago
      There has been some really interesting work on distributed streaming queries for monitoring/diagnostics eg http://p2.berkeley.intel-research.net/papers/EuroSys2006-debugging.pdf http://p2.berkeley.intel-research.net/papers/EuroSys2006-deb...
- markbnj 12y ago
  I think Microsoft does deserve some credit for the idea behind WMI, but when I worked with it I always got the sense that the API was sitting on top of a massive hairball that I didn't want to look at for too long. It was slow, but it worked. I'd be thrilled if osquery just achieved the same level of query completeness, and made it easier to find properties and query them. I found WMI confusing in that regard.
  - csours 12y ago
    A (not so) simple case: How many network interfaces do I have? WMIC gives one answer, Netsh gives another, ncpa.cpl - Network Control Panel gives another, hardware manager may give another. I'm impressed anything works.
    - bmajz 12y ago
      Oh, the wonders of legacy interfaces

by marpaia 12y ago

MrBuddyCasino 12y ago

Didn't want to give off a "someones been there and has done that already" vibe, your version definitely looks much better. Honestly, I found WMI to be lacking and also to be quite slow. Great to have a better alternative for unixes!

marpaia 12y ago
Of course, it's an intuitive comparison to make. I'm glad you like it! I'm looking forward to working with you and similarly insightful community members on improving osquery for everyone :)
- pstuart 12y ago
  Federated queries across machines would be quite cool.
  - jamii 12y ago
    There has been some really interesting work on distributed streaming queries for monitoring/diagnostics eg http://p2.berkeley.intel-research.net/papers/EuroSys2006-debugging.pdf http://p2.berkeley.intel-research.net/papers/EuroSys2006-deb...
markbnj 12y ago
I think Microsoft does deserve some credit for the idea behind WMI, but when I worked with it I always got the sense that the API was sitting on top of a massive hairball that I didn't want to look at for too long. It was slow, but it worked. I'd be thrilled if osquery just achieved the same level of query completeness, and made it easier to find properties and query them. I found WMI confusing in that regard.
- csours 12y ago
  A (not so) simple case: How many network interfaces do I have? WMIC gives one answer, Netsh gives another, ncpa.cpl - Network Control Panel gives another, hardware manager may give another. I'm impressed anything works.
  - bmajz 12y ago
    Oh, the wonders of legacy interfaces