Patent ID: 7234073

Claim:
A method for allocating and reallocating management responsibility of manageable entities to agents in a managed information network comprising: detecting a manageable entity requiring assignment of an agent for management responsibility of the manageable entity; identifying a manageable entity type of the manageable entity requiring reassignment of management responsibility; identifying a set of deployed agents in the managed information network, each of the agents having an agent type and operable to manage at least one manageable entity of a particular manageable entity type; defining failover rules, the failover rules for designating, based on the type of the agent, failover agents types operable to manage the manageable entities corresponding to the agent type, the failover rules further responsive to compatibility associations between the manageable entity types and the agent types, further comprising: defining an ordered set of rules, the ordered set of rules following a precedence, the precedence defining a priority order comprising: 1) failover chain, 2) highest agent version, 3) best logical distance to manageable object, and 4) lowest management load; applying the failover rules using the identified type of the manageable entity, the agent type of the managing agent and the compatibility associations to determine a primary agent from among the identified set of deployed agents for managing the manageable entity; and sending a message to the determined primary agent to inform the determined primary agent of the responsibility for managing the manageable entity.