Patent ID: 7720941

Claim:
A method of monitoring a plurality of network elements in a communications network, the method comprising: querying the plurality of network elements, in parallel, for respective reboot and/or reconfiguration event data, wherein the respective reboot and/or reconfiguration event data indicates a reboot and/or reconfiguration of a corresponding one of the plurality of network elements independent of information from a prior query; identifying a group of network elements including ones of the plurality of network elements based on the reboot and/or reconfiguration event data received responsive to the parallel querying, wherein the group comprises less than the plurality of network elements; in response to identifying the group of network elements querying the identified group of network elements, in series, and selectively requesting configuration information from ones of the identified group of network elements, wherein the configuration information is different from the reboot and/or reconfiguration event data; updating a network configuration database with the configuration information for the ones of the identified group of network elements; extracting information from the configuration information for the ones of the identified group of network elements; and storing the extracted information into independently searchable databases according to a category of the configuration information corresponding thereto, wherein each of the independently searchable databases comprises configuration information of a different category for the ones of the identified group of network elements.