Method and system for automatic detection of monitoring data sources

• US 7,734,637 B2
• Filed: 10/02/2003
• Issued: 06/08/2010
• Est. Priority Date: 12/05/2002
• Status: Expired due to Fees

• Current Assignee: Borland Software Corporation (Open Text Corporation)
• Original Assignee: Borland Software Corporation (Open Text Corporation)
• Inventors: Reiner, Stefan, Reithmayr, Clemens, Greifeneder, Bernd
• Primary Examiner(s): Alam; Hosain T
• Assistant Examiner(s): Saeed; Usmaan
• Application Number:
  US10/678,860
• Publication Number:
  US 20040111425A1
• Time in Patent Office: 2,441 Days
• Field of Search: 707 1-1041, 709/223, 709/229, 370/229, 370/401
• US Class Current: 707/758
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/3051 Monitoring arrangements for monitoring the configuration of the computing system or of the computing system component, e.g. monitoring the presence of processing resources, peripherals, I/O links, software programs verification or detection of system hardware configuration G06F11/2247
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/3086 where the reporting involves the use of self describing data formats, i.e. metadata, markup languages, human readable formats
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/3409 for performance assessment
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/3495 for systems
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 2201/875 Monitoring of systems including the internet

Abstract

The present invention is directed to a method and system for interfacing with various monitoring information sources from one or more computer systems with minimal user input. Each computer system may include one or more computers as well as any number of devices such as networking devices. Expert knowledge may be embedded in the data source monitoring software. These sources can later be used by data collection tools in order to extract monitoring information and present the information to the user or use it in another way (such as storing it or raising an alert when a certain monitored value exceeds a threshold). Furthermore, the user may decide which sources of information should be monitored by the data collection tools. The user may also use the present invention in order to inform him/herself of the configuration of the system he/she is monitoring.

Claims

1. A method for automated detection of monitoring data sources of at least one remotely located computer system in a network environment, said method comprising:

providing a configuration containing instructions that query at least one of said at least one remotely located computer system, said configuration comprising a service table identifying one or more services provided by the remotely located computer systems to monitor said at least one computer system, the services being non-monitoring specific and the remotely located computer systems absent the monitoring computer program, a detection table identifying information to detect at least one of the monitoring data sources, and a metric table identifying a metric for the at least one of the monitoring data sources;

providing a data detection module configured to generate multiple service probe requests to detect configured to identify different services at two or more remotely-located computer systems that are unidentified;

identifying, by said data detection module using said configuration, accessible data sources of at least one of said at least one computer system, the accessible data sources being different from that at another computer system;

using subsets of metric probe requests to collect from at least one of said computer systems meta and performance information of said accessible data sources of at least one of said at least one computer system, the meta and performance information comprising a response from at least one of the services provided by the remotely located computers systems, whereby one subset of the metric probe requests is based on identification of the at least one of the services and another subset of the metric probe requests is based on identification of another one of the services;

presenting said meta and performance information to a user;

presenting a list of said identified accessible data sources to said user,

wherein said list of said identified accessible data sources is derived using the different services;

transmitting sets of service probe requests including a first set of service probe requests and a second set of service probe requests to detect services in the remotely-located computer systems;

transmitting a number of monitoring information source (“

MIS”

) probe requests for each of the services that causes responses to the sets of service probe to detect a subset of MISs; and

associating each MIS of the subset of MISs with one of the services to form an association that is stored in a MIS detectable table,

wherein the MIS detectable table includes data from different services.

2. The method according to claim 1, further comprising the step of:

receiving access information from said user, wherein said access information comprises one member of the group consisting of a username and a password.

3. The method according to claim 1, further comprising the steps of:

receiving a list of data sources chosen by said user;

extracting said meta and performance data from said chosen data sources; and

presenting said meta and performance data to said user.

4. The method according to claim 1, further comprising the step of:

utilizing a probe engine to verify whether a service of one of said at least one computer system is responding, and

determining, said meta and performance data of an environment in which said service is running, in response to said probe engine verifying said service is running.

5. The method according to claim 4, wherein the service probing step is performed for each service of said at least one computer system.

6. The method according to claim 4, further comprising the steps of:

utilizing said probe engine to identify at least one monitoring information source in said at least one computer system, and

storing said monitoring information source in a list of said at least one identified monitoring information sources.

7. The method according to claim 6, wherein the monitoring information source probing step utilizes the probe engine to identify the monitoring information source and storing the monitoring information source in the list of detected monitoring information sources are performed for each monitoring information source of said at least one computer system.

8. The method according to claim 6, further comprising the step of:

utilizing said probe engine to determine a metric associated with each of said monitoring information sources.

9. The method according to claim 1, wherein said meta information comprises set-up information of said at least one computer system.

10. The method according to claim 3, wherein said list receiving step comprises receiving a range of data sources of said network environment, said range being specified by said user.

11. The method according to claim 1, wherein each of said services identified in said service table are associated with a service type, the method further comprising the step of activating a probe engine according to at least one service type, wherein the probe engine probes a monitoring information service to monitor information of the computer system.

12. The method according to claim 1, wherein the step of collecting meta and performance information further comprises populating the list of the accessible data sources, wherein the list of the accessible data sources is initially empty.

13. An apparatus for detecting and monitoring data sources, the apparatus comprising:

a computer having a processor and a memory configured to receive monitoring information from one or more remotely-located computer systems, the monitoring information concerning the operation of the one or more remotely-located computer systems; and

a computer-readable medium encoded with executable instructions configured to instruct the computer to;

implement probe engines to generate probe requests that detect services, at least two probe engines being configured to identify different services at the one or more remotely-located computer systems that are unidentified;

transmit a first set of service probe requests and a second set of service probe requests via a network to detect whether a first service and a second service, respectively, are associated with the remotely-located computer systems;

identify that the first service and the second service are available at a first remotely-located computer system and a second remotely-located computer system, respectively;

transmit a first set of metric probe requests and a second set of metric probe requests to the first service and the second service, respectively, to determine a first set of metrics and a second set of metrics, the transmission of the first set of metric probe requests and a second set of metric probe requests is based on responses generated by the first set of service probe requests and the second set of service probe requests;

generate data to present representation of the first set of metrics and the second set of metrics via a graphical user interface;

transmit sets of service probe requests including the first set of service probe requests and the second set of service probe requests to detect services in the remotely-located computer systems;

transmit a number of monitoring information source (“

MIS”

) probe requests for each of the services that causes responses to the sets of service probe to detect a subset of MISs; and

associate each MIS of the subset of MISs with one of the services to form an association that is stored in a MIS detectable table,

wherein the MIS detectable table includes data from different services.

14. The apparatus of claim 13, wherein the first service and the second service are different services.

15. The apparatus of claim 13, wherein at least one metric probe request from both the first set of metric probe requests and the second set of metric probe requests is transmitted to both the first service and the second service.

16. The apparatus of claim 13, wherein the computer-readable medium encoded with executables instructions further comprises executable instructions to:

transmit sets of metric probe requests for each of the MISs that causes a response to the number of MIS probe requests, the sets of metric probe requests including the first set of metric probe requests and the second set of metric probe requests to detect metrics in the remotely-located computer systems;

detect a subset of metrics; and

associate each metric of the subset of metrics with one of the MISs to form an association that is stored in a metric table,

wherein the MIS detectable table includes data from the different services,

wherein the first set of metric probe requests is a function of the first set of service probe requests and the second set of metric probe requests is a function of the second set of service probe requests.

17. The apparatus of claim 13, wherein the computer-readable medium encoded with executables instructions configured to identify that the first service and the second service are available for the first remotely-located computer system and the second remotely-located computer system, respectively, comprises executable instructions to:

determine that one of the first service and the second service is a command line-based service; and

determine that other of the first service and the second service is a graphical user interface (“

GUI”

)-based service.