Patent ID: 7061391

Claim:
A method for monitoring depletion of a consumable resource in a monitored system, comprising: receiving information on at least one unit of work to be processed by the monitored system, wherein the monitored system would deplete the consumable resource when processing each unit of work; determining a rate of resource depletion per unit of work processed; estimating an amount of resource remaining after the monitored system processes the at least one unit of work, wherein the estimate is a function of the determined rate of resource depletion and a number of the one or more units of work remaining to be processed, wherein estimating the amount of resource remaining comprises: (i) multiplying a number of one or more units of work to process times the rate of resource depletion to estimate an amount of resource depletion that results from processing the at least one unit of work; and (ii) setting the estimated amount of resource remaining to the estimated amount of resource remaining minus the estimated amount of resource depletion; and generating a graphical element for display on a computer monitor indicating the estimated amount of the resource remaining.