A Windows System Admin's Blog

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Get the username of a person logged onto a computer remotely using PowerShell and WMI

So recently I was out visiting a customer who had issues with someone hammering their internet.  We enabled netflow on their Cisco router to do a show top-talkers.  Once we got an IP address we were able to find the machine, but not who.  So I quickly entered the following into PowerShell and got the person we were after (change COMPUTERNAME to the target machine name).

Get-WmiObject Win32_ComputerSystem -ComputerName "COMPUTERNAME" |
Select-Object -ExpandProperty UserName

You will need to have admin rights on the target machine for the above to work.

Another way you can do it is to use wmic to achieve the same result, enter the below into a command prompt window, changing COMPUTERNAME to the target machine;

wmic.exe /node:COMPUTERNAME computersystem get username

Hope that helps someone out.

3 responses to “Get the username of a person logged onto a computer remotely using PowerShell and WMI”

  1. John AG Avatar
    John AG

    Hi John,

    Great post, actually very handy command. I usually use SCCM, but this can be a little time consuming.

    Simple powershell saves so much time.

    Reply
  2. John AG Avatar
    John AG

    Hi John,

    Great post, actually very handy command. I usually use SCCM, but this can be a little time consuming.

    Simple powershell saves so much time.

    Reply
  3. boB Avatar
    boB

    This is the same thing I’m using to determine if a machine $m is available for maintenance:
    $User = (Get-WmiObject -ComputerName $m.Name -Class Win32_ComputerSystem 2>$null) | Select UserName

    But what I’m finding is this shows me the user logged in LOCALLY, it does not show a user using RDP. Any idea how to identify a remote user??

    Thanks!!

    Reply

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