Patent ID: 8739157

Claim:
A method comprising: detecting a request to install a manager agent on an instance of a virtual machine to collect metrics, the instance executing a computing application within a virtualization service; in response to the request, accessing a manager agent object for loading the manager agent and installing the manager agent on the instance of the virtual machine to collect the metrics for the computing application; invoking the manager agent on the instance of the virtual machine that is executing the computing application to collect the metrics for the computing application; providing the collected metrics to a cloud manager executing within a hosted service system, the cloud manager being in communication with a rules engine, the rules engine to provide one or more rules for determining, based on the collected metrics, an instruction to automatically alter a current cloud deployment configuration of the computing application; receiving the instruction to automatically alter the current cloud deployment configuration of the computing application, the instruction generated based on trend data derived from the metrics collected over a trend time period for the computing application by the manager agent on the instance of the virtual machine that is executing the computing application; and automatically altering, using a processor of a machine, the current cloud deployment configuration of the computing application in response to the instruction generated based on the trend data.