Patent ID: 7676474

Claim:
A method comprising: receiving at least one attribute describing a log file that has been generated by an application during an execution of the application on at least one computer node, the log file representing a record of execution of the application, the computer node being one of a plurality of computer nodes of a distributed computer, the distributed computer having a computer-readable storage medium including a plurality of log files and meta data describing attributes of the log files, the distributed computer pools the resources of the plurality of computer nodes to emulate a single computer, the resources comprising computational resources and data storage resources; searching, by a log searcher, the meta data to identify one or more log files described by the received at least one attribute, the log searcher separate from a content searcher for searching content of the plurality of log files rather than the meta data, the attributes including one or more of the following: a unique identifier, an Internet Protocol address of the at least one computer node that executed the application, a host name of the at least one computer node that executed the application, a message associated with the at least one computer node that executed the application, an application family identifier, and a date of the execution by the at least one computer node; and presenting, based on the results of the searching step, locations of the identified log files in the computer-readable storage medium, the locations determined using memory addresses, each of which identifies the location in the computer-readable medium; wherein searching the meta data comprises at least partially decompressing a compressed data file containing the meta data, the compressed data file being associated with execution of one or more applications on the distributed computer.