Patent ID: 7058953

Claim:
A system manager for testing, administering and monitoring, and/or diagnosing problems with a distributed system having a plurality of computing machines, each machine including an event monitoring agent for monitoring for one or more pre-defined events occurring on the machine and/or for collecting usage statistics with respect to the machine, the system manager comprising a data collection module (DCM), a data management module (DMM), a data storing module (DSM), and a user interface module (UIM), the DCM for receiving a request from the DMM describing performance data to be collected from each of one or more of the machines of the system by way of the agent thereof, and based on the request for collecting such performance data from each agent and sending same to the DMM, the DMM for receiving the sent performance data from the DCM and storing the received performance data at the DSM along with metadata corresponding to the request for current and future usage, including monitoring, analyzing and evaluation, the UIM for receiving requests from a user and forwarding each received request to the DMM, and for formatting data from the DSM and representing the formatted data to the user, the DSM for storing performance data and corresponding metadata, the performance data comprising data as received from each agent in the system including raw values of a specific performance counter, the metadata comprising a description relating to circumstances of collecting the performance data, including data description information, data environment information, and a rule requiring performance of an action in response to a detection of a condition from performance data, the DMM for enforcing each rule by reviewing the performance data as received to determine if the condition thereof is met, and if so taking the corresponding action.