Patent ID: 8635376

Claim:
A system for collecting information related to I/O performance, comprising: a plurality of servers, each server including an input/output (I/O) controller configured as an initiator in the network, an agent configured for collecting initiator event data related to the performance of the network, and an initiator driver stack tailored for enabling communications between the agent and the I/O controller; and a network diagnostics manager configured for periodically polling the agents and collecting the initiator event data from the plurality of servers to assist in determining root causes of network performance issues, wherein the network diagnostics manager comprises: a service locations protocol (SLP) interface operable to communicate with the agents to determine an agent type; a collector operable to communicate with the SLP interface to identify one or more agents of a particular type and operable to periodically poll one or more agents to collect the initiator event data; a database operable to store the initiator event data; and a base application operable to retrieve the initiator event data.