One of the interesting things you can do with WMI is to capture ping information between two computers from a third computer without opening a remote command shell (using something like PSExec). I wrote RemotePing.vbs in 2005 and recently validated from a Windows 7 computer querying a remote XP computer. It can be run interactively, or by using the following syntax:
RemotePing /H:remotehost /T:Target [/N:number of pings]
Ex: RemotePing /h:MyDC /t:192.168.1.1 /n:4
Ex: remoteping /h:XPWS /t:AnyPC
Note the remote host and target information can be a name or an IP. The remote host must be running XP or later, and you must have admin rights to run this using WMI. The output looks like this:
Pinging 10.250.6.101 from BOBSCOMPUTER.MYDOMAIN.COM with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 10.250.6.101: bytes=32 time=32ms TTL=245
Reply from 10.250.6.101: bytes=32 time=32ms TTL=245
Reply from 10.250.6.101: bytes=32 time=34ms TTL=245
Reply from 10.250.6.101: bytes=32 time=31ms TTL=245
Ping statistics for 10.250.6.101 [10.250.6.101]:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 31ms, Maximum = 34ms, Average = 32ms