Patent ID: 7934248

Claim:
A computer-implemented method of coalescing compliance data at a node in a network, the method comprising: retrieving compliance data indicative of compliance with a set of policies, each of the policies having a set of rules; computing, for each of the policies, violations, each violation indicative of a deviation from a particular rule; displaying a summary view indicative of a plurality of policies in the set of policies, the summary view indicative of violations attributable to each of the policies; receiving, from a user, a detail selection corresponding to a subset of the displayed violations in the summary view; and displaying, for the received detail selection, a violation view having a set of violation entries corresponding to the detail selection, receiving the detail selection further comprising receiving a user selection indicative of at least one of: a prioritized ranking of violation occurrences indicative of violations having a particular ranking over a time interval; a frequency ranking of violation occurrences indicative of rules resulting in the violation occurrences; and a cause ranking of violation occurrences indicative of servers on which the violation occurred, each of the violations having a violation severity defined by a multi-tiered scale, the scale including a predetermined number of violations of a particular tier constituting a failure of the policy to which the violated rules belong, retrieving the compliance data further comprising agentless probing of network activity, the probing including: nonintrusive sniffing of interprocess communications without invoking agents on a monitored host in the network; conducting remote discovery probes to determine deeper configuration data; and updating a database table having entries indicative of relationships between applications, such that the applications provide connections and services to other applications in the network.