Patent ID: 7289947

Claim:
A method of finding costly interactions among components of a computer system, said method comprising: a. defining a graph having nodes which represent said components and having edges which represent interactions among said components; b. measuring costs of said system such that each path in said graph has an associated cost; c. defining a path-based interface, said interface providing operations to generate summaries which represent costs for associated paths in said graph and providing operations to query any of said summaries for its costs and associated paths, wherein said operations to generate said summaries comprise at least one of the following: selecting all paths in said graph whose edges have a common sequence of labels, selecting all paths in a given summary whose edges have a common sequence of labels, extending all paths associated with a given summary by adding edges that have a common label at one of the head and the tail of each path, shortening all paths associated with a given summary by removing an edge from one of the beginning and the end of each path, selecting all paths in said graph whose edges contain a given sequence of labels as a subsequence, selecting all paths in a given summary whose edges contain a given sequence of labels as a subsequence, selecting all paths in said graph whose edge label sequences match a given regular expression, selecting all paths in a given summary whose edge label sequence match a given regular expression, selecting all paths in said graph whose edge label sequences belong to a given formal language, selecting all paths in a given summary whose edge label sequences belong to a given formal language, performing compositions of the previous operations, performing alternations of the previous operations, and performing iterations of the previous operations; d. using the operations provided by the path-based interface to find costly summaries, whose associated paths represent costly interactions among components of the system; and e. displaying summary information to a user.