Patent ID: 8370487

Claim:
A system implemented in hardware, comprising: a computer infrastructure operable to: define one or a plurality of groups of subnetworks, each group of subnetworks comprising one or a plurality of subnetworks; retrieve information related to resources, in particular Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, allocated within a Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) server to each group of subnetworks; and transfer the information to a DHCP service monitoring system, the DHCP service monitoring system comprising means for retrieving the information from the one or a plurality of DHCP servers and means for aggregating the information for each group of subnetworks, wherein performance and availability of a DHCP service is monitored and optimized based on information aggregated for each group of subnetworks, wherein the means for aggregating the information for each group of subnetworks comprises determining a global utilization for each group of subnetworks, the global utilization being equal to a total number of IP addresses presently allocated to a group of subnetworks on all DHCP servers, divided by a total number of IP addresses that can be potentially allocated to the group of subnetworks on all DHCP servers, and wherein the monitoring and optimizing of the performance and availability of the DHCP service, comprises sending an action if the global utilization for the group of subnetworks reaches a predetermined threshold.