Patent ID: 7607572

Claim:
An apparatus for formalizing, diffusing and enforcing policy advisories and for monitoring policy compliance in the management of networks of computational devices, comprising: a unified management interface; a plurality of distributed clients, each of which runs on a corresponding networked computational device, wherein each of said distributed clients determines relevance of an advice message by evaluating a relevance clause of said advice message, while automatically retrieving properties of a computational device on which said distributed client runs; a central server coupled to a central database, said central server for coordinating relay of information to and from individual computational devices, storing and retrieving information about individual computational devices and presenting information to a system administrator via said unified management interface, said central server comprising: a registration server, wherein said registration server processes registration requests from distributed clients; a reporting server, wherein said reporting server process reports of relevance events from individual computers and passes them on to the central database; and an action server, wherein said action server receives action requests from said management console serves them up to individual distributed clients; at least one advice server providing a plurality of advisories directly to said distributed clients; a protocol for diffusing queries across the network; wherein said management interface conveys reports to said administrator received from said distributed clients via said central server; and wherein said advisories formally target specific states of a computational device and formally specify actions to take in response thereto.