Patent ID: 7657545

Claim:
A computer-implemented method for automated discovery and modelling of application services, wherein each application service depends on one or more software applications, computer systems and information technology (IT) infrastructure that support those software applications, the method including: (a) for a given application service, identifying a plurality of policies that describe elements that make up the given application service based on broadly specified criteria to identify, without specifying directly, the elements that make up the given application service in an environment, including software applications upon which the application service depends, the IT infrastructure that supports those software applications, and the users of those software applications, wherein the policies include at least one of the following criteria for a particular software application: i. PCs having the software application loaded; ii. servers having the software application loaded; iii. databases accessed by servers having the software application loaded; users for PCs having the software application loaded; iv. business units to which users for PCs having the software application loaded are assigned; and v. network infrastructure that connects together elements described by any of the above policies; (b) for each policy, identifying a data category, and identifying a collector module for gathering data of that data category; (c) instructing the identified collector modules to gather data; (d) processing the gathered data thereby to create/maintain data objects representing elements that describe, in a specific manner, software applications, IT infrastructure that supports those software applications, and the users of those software applications, wherein each object is indicative of its relationship with one or more other objects, wherein the relationships include: i. relationships in terms of IT infrastructure; and ii. relationships in terms of business topology; (e) for each given application service, instructing a plurality of correlator modules to sort and manipulate the data objects based on the policies, thereby to form relationships between software applications upon which the application service depends, IT infrastructure that supports those software applications, and the users of those software applications, thereby to create a model for the application service; (f) based on the model, automatically building an end-to-end application service map for each given application service; and (g) on the basis of the end-to-end application service map, performing impact prediction analysis in respect of the model, thereby to identify the impact of a failure in respect of an element, in terms of both infrastructure and business impact.