Patent ID: 8694475

Claim:
A method for providing situation-based management, the method comprising the steps of: receiving a collection of events by an event correlator process running on a machine; reducing multiple occurrences of identical events in the collection of events into a single representative event of the identical events; assigning additional contextual information to the single representative event to indicate multiple occurrences of the identical events; inferring a new event or a new quality of an event from the collection of events by the event correlator process; providing the collection of events and the new event or the new quality of an event to a situation manager process running on a machine; determining, with the situation manager process, if an existing situation corresponds to the collection of events and the new event or the new quality of an event; when an existing situation corresponds to the collection of events and the new event or the new quality of an event, updating the existing situation with information from the collection of events and the new event or the new quality of an event; and when an existing situation does not correspond to the collection of events and the new event or the new quality of an event: creating a new situation based, at least in part, on the inferred new event or the inferred new quality of an event by the situation manager process, wherein creating the situation includes matching the inferred new event or the inferred new quality of an event with a collection of situation templates in a situation template library, selecting one or more situation templates from the collection of situation templates, and populating the one or more selected situation templates with information from the collection of events and the inferred new event or the new quality of an event to create the new situation; and organizing the situation template library to include the new situation.