Patent ID: 8601489

Claim:
A management station for managing events that occur in a group of computer machines under a framework in which results of one or more equations associated with an event determine if an action is to be carried out in response to the event, the management station comprising: a communication interface configured to receive one or more event messages; and a processing unit coupled to the communication interface, wherein the processing unit includes an advanced variable dependency module and a shared variable data store, wherein the advanced variable dependency module is configured to: in response to receiving an event message, determine if the event is associated with one or more equations; and for at least one equation associated with the event, parse and tokenize a character string representing the equation, the character string comprising one or more delimited elements selected from the group consisting of a constant, a variable and a function, wherein each function accepts as input the one or more delimited elements; save the parsed and tokenized character string as a tokenized equation, wherein the tokenized equation identifies each equation element as a shared variable, a number or a function; retrieve corresponding shared variable values from the shared variable data store for evaluating the tokenized equation; evaluate the tokenized equation to calculate an equation result; save the equation result in the shared variable data store; and determine, based on the equation result, if an action should be initiated in response to the event.