Patent ID: 7761556

Claim:
A method comprising: executing a plurality of enterprise software applications on at least one computing device, wherein the enterprise software applications have one or more collector components that collect performance data from the enterprise software applications; creating, by a performance manager in the at least one computing device, a hierarchical data structure in accordance with a single configuration file, wherein the configuration file provides a definition of the hierarchical data structure that is created for storing the performance data collected from all of the one or more collector components, wherein the configuration file defines the hierarchical data structure to include: (1) an object class specifying an object representing a group of one or more counters; (2) at least one instance class specifying at least one instance that is a particular instantiation of the object; and (3) at least one counters class specifying data structures for storing count data associated with the object class or the instance class that has been collected from the one or more collector components, and wherein the hierarchical data structure is defined without regard to a data format required by a third-party performance monitoring software tool that receives output data from the performance manager; communicating performance data from all of the one or more collector components to the performance manager; aggregating the performance data within the hierarchical data structure by the performance manager in the at least one computing device by executing mechanisms of the performance manager to automatically create the instances of the objects and automatically total the performance data for the instances of the objects in accordance with the hierarchical data structure specified by the configuration file; communicating, by the performance manager, the aggregated performance data as output to a performance manager interface, wherein the performance manager interface is specific and particular to the third-party performance monitoring software tool, the performance manager being executed in a separate process space from both the third-party performance monitoring software tool and from the performance manager interface; formatting, by the performance manager interface in the at least one computing device, the aggregated performance data to comply with a specific data format required by the third-party performance monitoring software tool; and communicating the formatted, aggregated performance data from the performance manger interface to the third-party performance monitoring software tool for presentment to a user, wherein the formatted, aggregated performance data complies with the specific data format required by the third-party performance monitoring software tool.