Comment by marpaia | Hacker News Reader

Comment by marpaia | Hacker News Reader

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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-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

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.

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!

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 :)

Federated queries across machines would be quite cool.

There has been some really interesting work on distributed streaming queries for monitoring/diagnostics eg http://p2.berkeley.intel-research.net/papers/EuroSys2006-deb...

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.

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.

Oh, the wonders of legacy interfaces

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