Patent ID: 7996820

Claim:
A computer-implemented method of determining proportionate use of system resources by applications executing in a shared hosting environment, the method comprising: executing monitor agents, one monitor agent for one or more instances of the applications, including collecting by the monitor agents data describing each instance of use of a system resource by an instance of the applications; storing by the monitor agents the collected data in data records, each data record representing a use of the system resources by a using instance of an application, the using instance comprising an instance of an application that uses a resource as represented by a data record; storing by the monitor agents in the data records monitor tags, the monitor tags identifying each data record and identifying each using instance of an application for each data record; and billing for usage of computer resources in dependence upon information in the data records, including: extracting usage data from collected data for a selected one of a plurality of using instances of applications by selecting a plurality of data records having at least a portion of a monitor tag matching an identifier of the selected one of the plurality of using instances of applications; and billing for usage of the selected one of the plurality of using instances of the applications in dependence upon the collected usage data for the selected one of the plurality of instances of the application.