There is an industry initiative that establishes management infrastructure standards and provides a way to combine information from various hardware and software management systems. This initiative is called Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM). WBEM is based on the Common Information Model (CIM) schema, which is an industry standard driven by the Desktop Management Task Force (DMTF).
The snapshot monitors can be accessed by Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) by means of performance counters and using the built-in PerfMon provider.