Patent ID: 7483976

Claim:
A method for identifying an occurrence of a transaction, comprising: decomposing a set of one or more service request identifiers into at least one collection of service request identifiers expected to be an occurrence of a transaction, each service request identifier associated with a service request communicated between two network components and identified using a service request representation associated with the service request, each service request comprising at least a portion of a request by a first of the two network components for processing by a second of the two network components, each service request representation comprising a normalized service request to remove at least some service request-specific information from the service request, wherein the service request representations in the set of one or more service request identifiers are ordered by time; comparing a time interval between a second service request and a previous service request, wherein each of the second service request and the previous service request have a corresponding service request representation in the set of one or more service request identifiers, with a predetermined time interval to determine if the corresponding service request representation for the second service request and the corresponding service request representation for the previous service request are part of a same occurrence of a transaction; and comparing one or more service request identifiers that are part of the same occurrence of the transaction with a predetermined regular expression characterizing the same occurrence of the transaction.