Patent ID: 8650548

Claim:
A method for deriving software use and software data object characteristics, comprising: discovering automatically by a computer process one or more locations on one or more computer storage devices of a computer system where one or more configuration and data files associated with computer software components are stored; obtaining automatically by the computer process one or more attributes associated with said one or more computer software components by issuing one or more of commands of the computer system on the discovered one or more locations; issuing one or more software-specific commands provided by said one or more computer software components to determine one or more data objects created on a memory device and used by said computer software components, the data objects comprising one or more of database tablespace, a message queue, a lock, or an inter-communication pipe, or combinations thereof; collecting one or more related information associated with said one or more software computer components resulting from issuing one or more software-specific commands, the related information comprising at least said determined one or more data objects; mapping the one or more attributes to the one or more data objects; and determining frequency and recency of the software use based on the mapping without needing to open a file associated with said one or more software computer components and without needing said one or more software computer components generate a log.