Patent ID: 8763006

Claim:
A computer-implemented method comprising: determining that a workflow is to be created for an Information Technology (IT) environment, the IT environment including resources to be used to execute a business application, the business application defined based on a customer's specification to achieve an overall business requirement of the customer's business and having a quantitative business goal defined by the customer, the business application having an overall state produced based on state across a plurality of resources to be used to execute the business application, wherein a state of a resource includes at least one of available, degraded and unavailable defined based on a customer's own sensitivity to what can be tolerated for correct execution of the business application to meet the customer's defined quantitative business goal; and programmatically creating, by a processor, based on a current state of the IT environment, the workflow, the programmatically creating comprising: checking whether an operation is to be included in the workflow, the checking comprising determining whether the operation will have a desired effect on one or more resources to be used to execute the business application in order to meet the quantitative business goal of the business application; based on the checking determining the operation is to be included in the workflow, determining whether the operation is to be conditionally executed; based on determining the operation is to be conditionally executed, adding a conditional activity to the workflow to test one or more trigger conditions associated with the operation to determine based on current runtime conditions of the IT environment and one or more runtime properties of one or more resources of the business application whether the operation is to be executed; dynamically creating an external monitor based on configuration information related to one or more resource relationships of the business application, the external monitor to be used in determining whether a particular conditional activity of the workflow is to be performed; and based on the checking determining that the operation will have the desired effect on the one or more resources to meet the quantitative business goal of the business application, including the operation in the workflow.