Patent ID: 8095641

Claim:
A computer-implemented method for monitoring computational resources within a data processing system, the method comprising: receiving at a monitoring service a non-application-specific request to perform a monitoring operation to gather information about usage of a computational resource within a data processing system; automatically selecting, by the monitoring service from a set of monitoring applications each capable of performing the monitoring operation on the computational resource, a monitoring application based on at least one policy providing rules for selecting from amongst the set of monitoring applications each capable of performing the monitoring operation on the computational resource, wherein the non-application specific request is a generic request that is not executable by the selected monitoring application; mapping, using the at least one policy, the non-application-specific request to an application-specific request that contains a different form of request than what is contained in the non-application-specific request; and sending, by the monitoring service to the selected monitoring application, the application-specific request, wherein the application-specific request sent to the selected monitoring application identifies the computational resource and indicates the monitoring operation to be performed on the computational resource.