Patent ID: 8521864

Claim:
A method for monitoring resources within a computer system comprising: receiving a request from a computing device via a computer network requesting that at least one resource in the computer system be monitored, wherein the request is received by a collector, wherein the request includes a filename of a program that is to be executed in order to monitor the resource, a resource parameter indicating the type of resource that is requested to be monitored, and a resource parameter instance indicating the instance of the resource parameter that is requested to be monitored; storing within the collector a copy of a connection table stored within each of a plurality of monitoring processes, the connection table for each monitoring process comprising parameter information indicating identification information, status information, types of resources that the monitoring process is capable of monitoring, and a communications port or range of communications ports that the monitoring process monitors to receive a request; selecting, by the collector, a monitoring process from the plurality of monitoring processes that is capable of monitoring the at least one resource based upon a match between information in the received request and information within a corresponding connection table for the selected monitoring process; forwarding the request to the selected monitoring process within the plurality of monitoring processes via a communications port listed in the corresponding connection table; obtaining resource information from monitoring the at least one resource by the selected monitoring process; sending the resource information obtained from monitoring the at least one resource to the computing device that sent the request; enabling the selected monitoring process to terminate after execution of the request; receiving at the collector an updated copy of the connection table from the selected monitoring process after receiving the resource information from the selected monitoring process; and replacing a previous version of the copy of the connection table with the received updated copy of the connection table.