Patent ID: 8886985

Claim:
A method for operating a discovery system in a data center having a plurality of servers powered via a plurality of power supply outlets, the method comprising of steps of: selecting a feasible set of candidate power supply outlets for at least one of the servers connected to at least one of the plurality power supply outlets, the feasible set being a subset of the plurality of power supply outlets; collecting power consumption data for the feasible power outlets over time and central processing unit utilization data for the at least one server during an overlapping time by a data collection module of the discovery system; storing the information collected by a data collection module of the discovery system; correlating the CPU utilization data to the power consumption data for candidate pairings of feasible power supply outlets with the at least one server by a correlation engine of the discovery system according to a first set of metrics; determining whether correlations according to the first set of metrics indicate that the at least one server is associated with one or more of the set of feasible power supply outlets; and correlating the CPU utilization data to the power consumption data by the correlation engine according to a second set of metrics when the correlation according to the first set of metrics is insufficient to determine an association.