Patent ID: 7797147

Claim:
A method to determine whether one or more performance criteria of one or more service level agreements would be satisfied after implementing a proposed change to a software component, the method comprising: accessing a scalable model of a system that includes a plurality of components, the scalable model expressed at least in part in an extensible language and adhering to a system definition model, the plurality of components comprising software components, and the scalable model comprising: one or more service level agreement information pages accessible during operation of the system; a plurality of associated pages of data for each of the plurality of components, and wherein the plurality of associated pages comprises: an installation page; a constraints page; a monitoring page; and a description page, wherein the description page comprises data describing characteristics of a component, wherein the characteristics comprise: name of the component; manufacturer of the component; installation date of the component; and performance characteristics of the component; identifying relationships among the plurality of components based on the model of the system wherein the relationships comprise parent-child relationships wherein a parent component represents a roll-up of its child components; providing one or more rules that use at least some of the identified relationships to express logic of the scalable model of the system; identifying a proposed change to at least one of the software components; determining an expected impact on performance of the system caused by the proposed change, the determination being made at least in part based on the logic of the scalable model of the system and at least in part based on expected impact on performance for one or more parent components of the system based on cumulative expected impact on performance of related child components wherein expected impact on performance comprises one or more causes other than component failure; and based on the expect impact on performance of the system, determining whether one or more performance criteria of the one or more service level agreements information pages would be satisfied after implementing the proposed change wherein one or more performance criteria of a parent component depend on performance of the parent component's child components.