Installation process stops with “Service manager failed to open service Splunkd: The specified service does not exist as an installed service.”

[Ellen]

I am trying to install Spunk 4.1.3 on Windows XP with the default selections and under a user login with local administrator’s rights.
The installation process stops and a Window titled: “Splunk change service config” pops up and displays the message:

"Service manager failed to open service 'Splunkd': The specified service does not exist as an installed service."

A recheck of the user’s administrator’s privileges should be confirmed. Refer to the Windows installation doc and the necessary privileges here: http://www.splunk.com/base/Documentation/latest/Installation/InstallonWindows

To further debug the issue, an attempt to run: “msinfo32” to capture system information for this Windows host resulted in the following messages:

“Can’t collect information.  Cannot access the Windows Management Instrumentation software.  Windows Management files may be moved or missing”    

Why is this stalled?

[Ellen · Accepted solution]

The same error message occurred when with another login with administrator’s group rights as well.

Check the status of the WMI service via Start > Run > enter services.msc and check to ensure the Windows Management Instrumentation service has been enabled.
Enable WMI and retry running msinfo32.

There are many online references on how to resolve the Windows “Can’t collect information” message.

In this case, the user found repairing WMI resolved their issue and thereafter installing Splunk was successful.

[gkanapathy]

At root, this is a result of COM+/DCOM permissions for the user/group on the machine. To view and edit those, you can use the Windows tool DCOMCNFG.EXE.