Patent ID: 7506143

Claim:
A method for monitoring configuration information of computing devices that are servers, the method comprising: providing at a monitoring server a desired configuration monitor document that specifies configuration settings for applications that execute on the computing devices and associated rules for determining whether a configuration settings of the applications are in compliance, the rules being organized based on applications that use the configuration settings, at least one rule being an active rule that references a passive rule that specifies how to create a value that is used by the active rule, at least one rule specifying how to place a configuration setting that is not in compliance into compliance; distributing from the monitoring server a copy of the desired configuration monitor document to each of the computing devices; and under control of each of the computing devices and for each application of the desired configuration monitor document, for each configuration setting for that application specified in the desired configuration monitor document, determining whether the rule associated with the configuration setting indicates whether the configuration setting is in compliance by when the rule specifies a passive rule, creating a value as specified by the passive rule and using the created value to determine whether the configuration setting is in compliance; and when it is determined that the configuration setting is not in compliance, logging that the configuration setting is not in compliance and when the rule specifies how to place a configuration setting that is not in compliance into compliance, automatically placing the configuration setting into compliance in accordance with the rule; and reporting to the monitoring server that the logged configuration settings are not in compliance and whether the configuration setting that was not in compliance has been corrected.