Patent ID: 7444355

Claim:
A method for assigning management responsibility to agents for management of manageable entities comprising: retrieving access data from a repository, the access data enabling an agent to gain management access to at least one manageable entity; transmitting a discovery message to an agent, the discovery message including the access data corresponding to manageable entities accessible by the agent according to a type of the manageable entity; and receiving, from the agent, a manageable entity list message indicative of manageable entities manageable by the agent based on the access data transmitted to the agent, the manageable entity list message operable for determining assignment of management responsibility to the agent for at least one manageable entity of the manageable entities indicated in the manageable entity list message, further comprising: receiving, from a user, an indication of a new access data parameter for a manageable entity type; adding the received access data to the repository; sending discover messages corresponding to the access data to each of the agents operable to manage the type of manageable entity corresponding to the added access data parameter; and receiving the manageable entity list corresponding to the sent discovery message, the manageable entity list operable to enable adding the newly added manageable entity to a management correlation, and further operable to enable reprocessing the management correlation, according to agent allocation logic, to select a particular agent as the primary agent for the newly added manageable entities.