Patent ID: 8346748

Claim:
In a computing environment, a method for discovering environment objects in the computing environment to provide information management, the method comprising: querying the computing environment to discover and collect information about the environment objects in the computing environment by an information management system, wherein the information management system is configured to identify services for data objects stored in the computing environment and orchestrate performance of the services for the data objects, wherein querying the computing environment includes: walking IP addresses in the computing environment to at least discover which of the environment objects act like servers, wherein which environment objects act like servers is included in the collected information; using one or more adapters that interface with an information management system and with the computing environment to identify the environment objects in the computing environment and/or collect the information environment objects, wherein some of the one or more adapters are configured to collect specific data from the environment objects, wherein the specific data is included in collected information; and monitoring the computing environment to discover relationships between the environment objects, wherein the environment objects in the computing environment include at least one of servers and services and applications operating in a network included in the computing environment, wherein information about the relationships is included in the collected information; providing the collected information to the information management system, wherein the collected information is stored in a database by the information management system, wherein the collected information identifies at least hardware in the computing environment, software operating in the computing environment, a hardware configuration of the hardware, a software configuration of the software, and relationships between the software and the hardware or between software or between hardware; and generating results from the collected information stored in the database, wherein the results enable the information management system to assign service levels to the data objects in the computing environment based on the information collected from the environment objects, wherein the services are provided to the data objects according to the assigned service levels.