Patent ID: 7546601
Filing Date: 2009-06-09
Classification: G06Q

Abstract:
1. An apparatus to automatically discover and group resources used by a business process, the apparatus comprising: a monitoring module configured to collect trace data representative of operations performed by software applications; an analysis module configured to analyze the trace data to discover resources affiliated with a business process that includes at least one of the software applications, wherein the affiliation between the discovered resources and the business process is initially unknown, wherein the analysis module analyzes the trace data by applying at least two heuristic routines to the trace data, and wherein the at least two heuristic routines are selected from a group consisting of a first heuristic routine to identify resources used by child applications of the software components, a second heuristic routine to identify resources in the same directories as the discovered resources, a third heuristic routine to identify sub-directories or parent directories of a discovered resource associated with the software components, a fourth heuristic routine to determine if a discovered resource is associated with an installation package, a fifth heuristic routine to identify resources used in a time window associated with a start time for execution of a discovered resource, and a sixth heuristic routine to identify resources based on user-defined rules; and a determination module configured to define a logical application comprising a set of resources facilitating implementation of the business process, the set of resources comprising the discovered resources; wherein the monitoring, analysis, and determination modules each comprise at least one of logic hardware and executable code, the executable code being stored on one or more memory devices.