Patent ID: 7930396

Claim:
A method of providing business service management (BSM) of a business service, the method comprising: defining a business service model, representative of a business service, said business service to be managed by a plurality of programmable processing devices; identifying physical IT resources capable of having an impact on the business service, wherein the physical IT resources are distributed throughout an IT infrastructure; identifying logical IT resources capable of having an impact on the business service or on other logical IT resources capable of having a collective impact on the business service; associating the identified physical and logical IT resources with processing cells, distributed throughout the IT infrastructure, and the business service model, wherein the processing cells execute on at least one of the programmable processing devices; associating rules with the processing cells, the rules including an aggregation rule defining how one collected event is combinable with another collected event; monitoring the physical IT resources for detectable information with at least one of the programmable processing devices, to create collected information; receiving two or more events at least one of the processing cells; evaluating the two or more received events, by at least one of the processing cells, using the aggregation rules associated therewith to create aggregated information; abstracting the collected information and aggregated information to generate one or more abstract events for at least one of the logical IT resources; and determining a status impact on the business service based at least in part on the generated abstract event(s).