Patent ID: 7661135

Claim:
A method to gather trace data indicative of resource activity of a logical application and to identify resources related to a business process, the method comprising: initiating a plurality of activity monitors of a monitoring module on a target computer system executing said logical application, the target computer system comprising one or more processors, each activity monitor configured to detect a specific type of resource activity and configured to detect a different type of resource activity independent of other activity monitors, the monitoring module interacting with a process manager, a file I/O module, and a network I/O module to collect said trace data representative of said resource activity wherein at least one activity monitor comprises a low-level I/O module that receives all I/O communication for a class of peripheral devices of the target computer system; determining activity indicators involving the resources of the logical application by way of said each activity monitor, the activity indicators identifying one or more resource activities and comprising process spawning operations, file I/O operations, and network I/O operations wherein said logical application is a collection of said resources required to implement a particular business process; organizing the activity indicators from said each activity monitor into said trace data, the trace data organized according to a standard data exchange format and comprising current activity indicators and historical activity indicators comprising a continuous historical record of activity indicators stored at a plurality of different points in time, the trace data comprising an identifier configured to associate the trace data with said business process, the business process comprising operation of a plurality of hardware and software components in cooperation to execute a service; storing the trace data in a central repository implemented on computer readable storage; filtering the trace data by the identifier to identify said resources related to the business process, each resource comprising a confidence value configured to indicate how likely the resource is associated with the business process; and communicating the trace data to a third-party computer process in response to a request from the third-party computer process, the request conforming to an application program interface (API).