Patent ID: 7574503

Claim:
A method of extracting, for a selected communication protocol, status information related to a monitored device communicatively coupled to a network, comprising: accessing the monitored device using the selected communication protocol to obtain at least vendor information related to the monitored device; obtaining, from a first memory, information identifying an access function for extracting the status information from an accessible data on the monitored device; generating a string based on the obtained vendor information and the obtained access function information; retrieving, from a second memory in correspondence to the generated string, (1) information of a data processing object associated with the access function, and (2) an information map that includes at least a type of status information to be extracted from the monitored device and a weight associated with the status information, the weight representing a priority of the status information to be extracted by the selected communication protocol; accessing the monitored device using the access function, the information map, and the selected communication protocol to obtain the status information; and storing the obtained status information, in a third memory, based on a comparison between the weight that is associated with the status information obtained using the selected communication protocol, and another weight that is associated with the status information obtained using another communication protocol, wherein the accessing the monitored device using the access function comprises accessing the monitored device to obtain the status information based on the weight representing the priority of the status information.