Patent ID: 8195789

Claim:
A non-transitory computer readable medium forming a computer storage product, including executable instructions to identify underlying services of transactions in a service-oriented architecture (“SOA”)-based computer network, the computer readable medium comprising executable instructions to: characterize messages communicating among services by applying a function to each message to transform each message into a characterization value having a fixed length indicative of the contents of each message, thereby forming characterization values, each service receiving and/or transmitting messages associated with a plurality of transactions that are unspecified by the associated messages, each transaction being supported by a subset of said services; determine if the messages are inbound messages or outbound messages; based on the messages being an inbound message or an outbound message, associate each of the messages with one of the said services; based on the association of two or more messages with the same service, link the two or messages to form a context for the two or more messages; enhance the characterization values for each of the two or more messages by incorporating the context with the characterization values; store said enhanced characterization values external to said messages without altering said messages; compare enhanced characterization values to determine dependencies within a subset of said services; and determine at least one of the plurality of transactions as supported by the subset of said services according to the determined dependencies.