Community
- Command Central
- MVP Program
- Monthly Mission
- Blogs
- Groups
- Events
- Media Vault
Products
- Observability
- Network Management
- Application Management
- IT Security
- IT Service Management
- System Management
- Database Management
Content Exchange
- SolarWinds Platform
- Server & Application Monitor
- Database Performance Analyzer
- Server Configuration Monitor
- Network Performance Monitor
- Network Configuration Manager
- SQL Sentry
- Web Help Desk
Free Tools & Trials
Store

Asset discovery tool cannot reach Windows 10 endpoints via WMI

As the subject states, my Windows 10 PCs can't be reached. Disabling the firewall makes them reachable, so obviously a port or rule needs to be enabled. Can anyone confirm what rule or port this might be?

I've recently deployed Windows 7 AND Windows 10 PCs. Only the Windows 10 PCs have this issue. My gut feeling is that this is an OOTB configuration difference in the Win 10 firewall and I am not the first to have this issue... hoping to find others here with that experience. Thank you in advance.

Craig

Find more posts tagged with

windows 10

WMI

Accepted answers

csmith6

The following command resolves the issue:

netsh advfirewall firewall set rule group="windows management instrumentation (wmi)" new enable=yes

Not sure why it doesn't work out of the box, but that's what I am seeing.

All comments

csmith6

After diagnosing the issue of WMI being unavailable remotely, I disabled and re-enabled the firewall on one of the affected Windows 10 PCs. Without any other changes, WMI services were available remotely, and that PC was picked up by the discovery tool.

Can anyone tell me what is up with that?

csmith6

The following command resolves the issue:

netsh advfirewall firewall set rule group="windows management instrumentation (wmi)" new enable=yes

Not sure why it doesn't work out of the box, but that's what I am seeing.

jeremymayfield

Do you have to do this on every windows 10 PC or can you push that out somehow?

csmith6

I would have pushed an update, but at this point I still have less than 10 PCs in production running Windows 10. I updated each of them with the above script, and added that step to the deployment checklist. It takes 5 seconds to run, so there's no sense in adding management overhead.

I'm trying to figure out how I am the only one noticing this behavior in this whole forum? I mean, my luck is notoriously bad, but this is surprising.

kellytice

Just FYI, this MS page talks about the setting:

Setting up a Remote WMI Connection (Windows)

When it comes to doing that in bulk, I'd assume you could add it to the login script.

A user in this thread proposes another solution (using Group Plicy to make a firewall change):
Group Policy to Allow WMI Access to Remote Machine
but i haven't done that myself. It seems to have worked for some others in that thread.

csmith6

@kellytice That's actually the article that I already read to find the command line to open the firewall as needed. Thank you for that as well. Fortunately, this wasn't much of a "bulk" operation for me yet. It took far less time to just update the handful of Windows 10 PCs I have deployed than to develop and test a managed deployment. I also do not use login scripts here. We used to have scripts in place for drive mapping and printer mapping, but I replaced those with GPOs.

I also wasn't sure of the effect of this script on Windows 7 machines. I do not have Windows 10 machines in a separate OU either, so directing a group policy deployment to them would have required setting up an OU under the current one, or using a WMI filter to identify the OS version... and we can see the issue with that last solution.

jeremymayfield

Well the strange thing is i have windows machines that it detected and some it didn't. I ran the code and it worked after that. I am wondering if its the version of Windows 10.