Patent ID: 7617304

Claim:
A method, comprising: identifying, at a processor, at least one policy as a dynamic policy; specifying, by the processor, at least one part of a policy statement of the dynamic policy to have a value that can be varied while the policy is active; providing the policy statement to comprise a conditional part and an action part that is carried out when the conditional part evaluates to true and a priority part for determining which action to carry out when at least two policy statements exist with the same conditional part and when the conditional part of each of the at least two policy statements evaluates to true, where the specifying comprises delimiting at least one of the conditional part, action part and priority part using a predetermined delimiter; varying a value of at least one of the conditional part, the action part, and the priority part when the policy is active, where the value is variable; and during operation of the policy-managed system, determining if the policy statement comprises the predetermined delimiter, and if so, retrieving a current value of any delimited conditional part, action part and priority part prior to evaluating the policy statement to determine if the conditional part is currently true and operating at least one sensor coupled to the policy-managed system to use system-level system commands and to discover a value of at least one metric of the service level agreement of the policy managed system, and comparing an output of the at least one sensor to the value of the conditional part of a policy statement being evaluated by the processor to determine if the conditional part is currently true; and if the conditional part is determined to be true, performing a corresponding action through an effector.