Patent ID: 7996814

Claim:
A meta-application system for managing a computer system including a deployment of a software application, comprising: a telemetry component that collects data values of state metrics associated with the deployment, at least some of the data values being numerical; an application model that represents the deployment, the application model comprising: an object graph representing hardware and software elements of the managed computer system, the elements represented as objects of the graph, the object graph including information about relationships between the elements; configuration data about the elements; and tests for determining behavioral information about at least some of the elements; a discovery component configured to conduct, after installation of the deployment, automated discovery of information about at least the deployment, by sending software probes onto a communication network, the discovery component configured to discover software services that are not provided by the deployment or the meta-application system, the discovery component configured to use the discovered information to create the application model, wherein the discovery component is configured to, after creating the application model, dynamically modify the application model on an ongoing basis in response to detected changes of configuration of the deployment; a repository of encoded knowledge comprising: a collection of deployment-independent rules describing known problems associated with the software application, at least some of the rules comprising logical combinations of conditions individually satisfied by features of the deployment; and deployment-independent remedies for countering the problems; an analysis subsystem that detects instances of the problems within the deployment, at least by programmatically using features of the deployment to satisfy at least some of the logical combinations of conditions of the rules, at least one of the conditions of the collection of rules being numerical, at least one of the features comprising or being derived from one or more of the collected state metric data values, the analysis subsystem configured to submit queries to the application model for information about the deployment, the analysis subsystem configured to use the information obtained by the queries as features for satisfying individual conditions of the rules, in order to implement said detection of said problem instances; and one or more computer systems operative to implement the telemetry component, application model, discovery component, repository, and analysis subsystem; wherein the telemetry component, application model, discovery component, and analysis subsystem comprise code that is separate from code of the software application of the managed computer system.