Patent ID: 7765540

Claim:
A method of managing an application or service, comprising: receiving the application or service for installation on a system; attributing selected parts of code of the application or service with management information, wherein attribution allows a system user to specify rules in the management information that identify one or more system health criteria that are to be met for the system to be considered healthy, the system health criteria indicating a plurality of different health states including intermediate health states that indicate a partially healthy or partially unhealthy system, the management information being identified within the attributed application or service using a uniform resource identifier, wherein the uniform resource identifier includes documentation falling into categories: text description, a browser compatible help-link, parameter documentation, and a set of tags; exposing the management information to a management system; controlling the application or service based upon the management information that is exposed when the application or service is installed on the system; and generating a manifest based on the exposed management information.