Patent ID: 7600146

Claim:
A method for providing a user with an application monitoring and disaster recovery management tool, comprising the steps of: deploying a first plurality of intelligent agents within a primary computing environment, said primary computing environment including a primary server executing an application, and wherein each of said first plurality of intelligent agents monitors a metric related to said application; monitoring, by a monitoring and management server module executing on a management server, a plurality of states, each of said plurality of states being rendered by one of said first plurality of intelligent agents, wherein the management server is in communication with the primary computing environment and a secondary computing environment; displaying to the user, via a graphical user interface in communications with said monitoring and management server module, said plurality of states; and performing a failure switch-over from said primary computing environment to the secondary computing environment having a secondary server capable of executing said application in response to a first input received from the user via said graphical interface; performing a switch-back from said secondary computing environment to said primary computing environment in response to a second input received from the user on said graphical user interface wherein said second input is received by said monitoring and management server module as a result of a button click by the user on said graphical user interface; and archiving data from said secondary data repository to one of a plurality of archival data stores in response to a second input received from the user via said graphical interface, wherein each of said plurality of archival data stores contains a different point-in-time level snapshot of data stored in said secondary data repository; whereby said method allows for disaster recovery and fault tolerance, and limits computing down-time experienced by end users of said primary computing environment.