On-line service/application monitoring and reporting system

• US 20050138111A1
• Filed: 01/31/2005
• Published: 06/23/2005
• Est. Priority Date: 10/15/2003
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC (Microsoft Corporation)
• Original Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
• Inventors: Beish, Phillip I., Aton, Todd R.
• Granted Patent: US 7,457,872 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 709/201
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/3476 Data logging G06F11/14, G06F11/2205 take precedence
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/3495 for systems
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 2201/81 Threshold
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 2201/86 Event-based monitoring
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 2201/865 Monitoring of software
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 2201/88 Monitoring involving counting

Abstract

An event monitoring and logging system, including apparatuses and methods, for instrumenting an on-line application program, or service, for generating and communicating events upon the occurrence of certain conditions during the execution thereof, for monitoring generated events in real and near-real time in accordance with configurable rules, for generating and communicating selected alerts to appropriate personnel upon the exceeding of configurable thresholds, for logging generated events and related information in data files and databases for subsequent analysis, and for producing reports related to such instrumentation and generated events.

Claims

1. A system for monitoring and logging events generated during the execution of an on-line service application, the system comprising:

a computer operable to execute an on-line service application, and

an event generator program residing on the computer, the event generator software program operable to generate critical events associated with a category and severity, generate trace events associated with a category and level, generate exception events, and generate ship assert events, the event generator program providing data and information representative of the performance of the on-line service application during execution thereof by the computer.

2. The system of claim 1, further comprising an administrator interface operable to allow an administrator to throttle a number of critical events generated based on category and severity.

3. The system of claim 1, further comprising an administrator interface operable to allow an administrator to throttle a number of trace events generated based on category and level.

4. The system of claim 1, wherein the event generator program is operable to compare a severity parameter value in a call to a value in a throttle mapping table for a category value in a category parameter before generating a critical event.

5. The system of claim 1, wherein the event generator program is operable to compare a level parameter value in a call with a level value in a throttle mapping table for a category value in a category parameter before generating a trace event.

6. The system of claim 1, wherein critical events are associated with severities including service unavailable, security breach, critical error, error, warning, failure audit, success audit, and information.

7. The system of claim 1, wherein trace events are associated with levels including critical, exception, assert, unexpected, monitorable, high, medium, verbose, and extreme.

8. The system of claim 1 wherein the event generator program includes functionality to forward event logs to a corporate error reporting computer or error reporting computer.

9. A computer-readable medium having computer executable instructions when executed perform a method for executing an on-line service application, the method comprising:

generating critical events associated with a category and severity,

generating trace events associated with a category and level,

providing data and information representative of the performance of the on-line service application, and

monitoring and logging events.

10. The computer-readable medium of claim 9, wherein the method further comprises throttling a number of critical or trace events generated.

11. The computer-readable medium of claim 9, wherein the method further comprises associating critical events with severities including service unavailable, security breach, critical error, error, warning, failure audit, success audit, and information.

12. The computer-readable medium of claim 9, wherein the method further comprises forwarding events to an corporate error reporting computer or error reporting computer.

13. The computer-readable medium of claim 11, wherein the method further comprises generating alerts in response to threshold criteria being exceeded by certain events.

14. A method of executing an on-line service application, the method comprising:

generating events associated with a category,

throttling a number of events generated, and

monitoring and logging events.

15. The method of claim 14, further comprising associating critical events with a severity and category.

16. The method of claim 15, further comprising associating events with severities including service unavailable, security breach, critical error, error, warning, failure audit, success audit, and information.

17. The method of claim 14, further comprising associating trace events with a level and category.

18. The method of claim 14, further comprising throttling a number of trace events generated based on category and level.

19. The method of claim 14, further comprising throttling a number of critical events generated based on category and severity.

20. The method of claim 14, further comprising forwarding events to a corporate error reporting computer or error reporting computer.