How WMI, DCOM, RPC and UAC effect access to remote Window Systems for Monitoring

I was banging my head against the wall for several hours trying to get a Windows Machine to be monitored via WMI without local admin permissions. I spent hours trying to get it to work and even though classes would be enumerated the data returned would be null. I almost gave up but then added a vanilla domain user account to the built-in Local Windows group "Performance Monitor Users", not "Performance Log Users" and all worked perfectly. No need to play around with DCOM or WMI permissions at all. It just worked.