Patent ID: 8381167

Claim:
A business service discovery (BSD) system comprising a processing resource in communication with a non-transitory computer-readable medium, wherein the computer-readable medium contains a set of instructions and wherein the processing resource is designed to carry out the set of instructions to discover, format, and store configuration information related to a business service, the system comprising: an input module capable of receiving hints and conditions related to nodes in the business service; a discovery engine, coupled to the input module, that receives the hints and conditions related to a physical computing object underlying the business service and creates a corresponding search methodology, wherein the discovery engine begins a discovery search by dispatching an appropriate discovery component to the physical computing object with the most specific hints or conditions; a template module coupled to the discovery engine, wherein the template module comprises search templates useable by the discovery engine to create the search methodology; and a plurality of discovery components that when activated by the discovery engine discover the physical computing object underlying the business service, wherein a discovery component comprises: a definition of a corresponding BSD class model, an application signature definition used to discover a specific instance of applications of the BSD class defined in the BSD class model, and a universal configuration management database (uCMDB) graph engine that creates a uCMDB graph representing a physical computing object discovered by the discovery component.