Patent ID: 7702960

Claim:
A method of controlling failure data reporting implemented by a support provider within a network that includes a failure data management server connected to one or more clients as well as the support provider, the method comprising acts of: support provider receiving a filtered error report corresponding to one or more error reports gathered by a failure data management server from one or more clients experiencing one or more failures and which have been filtered by the failure data management server according to user input that defines one or more transmission filter rules to be met when the error report is to be sent to the support provider; the filtered error report having also been filtered according to one or more collection filter rules that restrict which failure data is to be included within the filtered error report; wherein each filtered error report received by the support provider has been filtered to remove any failure data that fails to satisfy the one or more collection filter rules and such that the filtered error report received by the support provider satisfies the one or more transmission filter rules, with failure data that satisfies the one or more collection filter rules; support provider analyzing the filtered error report to determine an appropriate response to be sent to the one or more clients; and support provider sending one or more failure responses to the one or more clients in response to receiving the filtered error report and in response to performing the analysis on the filtered error report.