Patent ID: 7665098

Claim:
A computerized method for monitoring the interactions of application programs in a computing device with stored data, said computerized method comprising: intercepting application programming interface (API) calls from a plurality of application programs to a data store, said data store being accessible to the computing device within a housing of the computing device; in response to the intercepted API calls, identifying pre-execution data relating to each of the intercepted API calls, said identifying including identifying identities of the plurality of application programs, a machine identifier of the machine on which the plurality of application programs are executing, an application program version identifier for each of the plurality of application programs, and an application type identifier for each of the identified pre-execution date for each of the plurality of application programs; executing the intercepted API calls by routing the API calls to the data store; in response to completing the execution, identifying post-execution data relating to each of the executed API calls including identifying data resulting from the executed intercepted API calls and identifying machine-specific or system-specific information; normalizing the identified pre-execution data and the identified post-execution data from each of the API calls to create normalized interaction data for each of the API calls, said normalizing comprising removing the identified machine identifier in the pre-execution data and the identified machine-specific or system-specific information from the post-execution data, said created normalized interaction data including the pre-execution data and the post-execution data rewritten in a generic format; combining the normalized interaction data for each of the API calls as a function of the application programs associated with each of the API calls; and storing the combined interaction data for analysis of the interactions between the application programs and the data store.