Well, WMI and WBEM are the M$ flavors (for MS OS's) of what you need the server side of the Desktop Management Interface http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desktop_Management_Interface, but the godl mine of specifications is from the Distributed Management Task Force http://www.dmtf.org/home/ on their...

There is a good sample of how to parse web logs at http://www.biterscripting.com/Download/SS_WebLogParser.txt . You can modify it to meet your requirements. I am a system admin and have been using a lot of variants of that script on a daily basis. Works on all Windows versions. Patrick