Testing WMI functionality

I'm getting a handle on WMI and how to query.  One thing I'd like to do is know if the WMI on a remote PC is running, and if possible, if it's broken.

I tried one possible method of using "wmic os" to check it.  But what I found was when I stopped the WMI process and ran "wmic os" on the local PC, it restarted the WMI service, then reported the data.  No error messages or anything.