Patent ID: 8892960

Claim:
A method of determining a root cause of a performance problem, comprising: providing a set of diagnostic rules in a knowledge base, wherein said rules define relationships between a set of known causes and behavioral patterns in a plurality of performance metrics exposed by each of a plurality of components on an application server; analyzing each of the plurality of components to identify a plurality of common constraints contributing to performance problems of the plurality of components; deriving an efficiency measure for each component based on an additional plurality of performance metrics describing the plurality of common constraints; identifying a problem component by evaluating and comparing the efficiency measure for each component over a first time period, wherein the problem component exposes at least one performance metric that has violated a pre-determined threshold; analyzing each of the performance metrics exposed by the problem component over a second time period, which is longer than the first time period, to identify a performance metric that displays an increasing or decreasing trend in values recorded for the performance metric over the second time period; and executing the diagnostic rules to detect a behavioral pattern that matches the trend to identify a potential cause of the problem component.