Patent ID: 7099938

Claim:
A method carried out by a status engine for monitoring services of an information technology (IT) environment, comprising: storing a representation of a service hierarchy, the stored representation comprising service elements representing the services of the IT environment, wherein each of the service elements has an associated status, the service hierarchy comprising superordinate and subordinate service elements; calculating the status of a superordinate service element according to one or more rules, wherein the calculation depends on messages affecting the superordinate service element received from the IT environment, the status of at least one subordinate service element that is independently received from the messages, and additional attributes of the superordinate service element and/or the subordinate service elements, and wherein the rules define the dependency of the status of the superordinate service element on the statuses of the at least one subordinate service elements and a propagation of the statuses from the at least one subordinate service element to the superordinate service element, the rules comprising at least one of: a rule that is based on additional attributes, other than the statuses, of the superordinate service element and/or the at least one subordinate service elements; a rule that ignores one or more of the subordinate service elements; a rule that is defined by a user on the basis of logical and/or arithmetical operations of the statuses or attributes of the at least one subordinate services elements; and a rule that is programmed individually by the user; and displaying monitoring results to the user.