Methods, systems and computer program products for triggered data collection and correlation of status and/or state in distributed data processing systems

#This invention relates generally to data processing systems, and more particularly, to the management of distributed data processing systems.

#Distributed data processing may pose a unique set of management challenges. Because functionality is, typically, distributed and may interact across a wide variety of communications media including, but not limited to, local area networks (LANS), wide area networks (WANS), satellite communications, cellular networks, packet radio networks, and so forth, it may be difficult to manage service quality in such systems, in locating the components causing service quality problems, and/or in allocating resources to improve service quality. Because a data processing system may be composed of a number of physical and logical systems, and these systems may in turn host a great number of software components, which in turn, may host more dependent software components, the problem may not be just one of distribution, but of complexity as well.

#Many of these discrete hardware and software components may be instrumented to provide visibility into the status and/or state of the specific component and of the data processing system comprised, in whole or in part, of these components. A distributed data processing system may include hundreds, or even thousands of these components. Each component may have tens or hundreds of instrumented measures and attribute data. The volume of data available for inspection may make it difficult, if not impossible, to ascertain the causes of service quality problems in complex distributed data processing systems.

#FIG. 1 is a flowchart illustrating operations for collecting data processing system status information according to embodiments of the present invention;

#FIG. 2 is a flowchart illustrating operations for collecting and correlating data processing system status information according to further embodiments of the present invention;

#FIG. 3 is a block diagram of a data processing system suitable for use in embodiments of the present invention;

#The present invention now will be described more fully hereinafter with reference to the accompanying drawings, in which illustrative embodiments of the invention are shown. This invention may, however, be embodied in many different forms and should not be construed as limited to the embodiments set forth herein; rather, these embodiments are provided so that this disclosure will be thorough and complete, and will fully convey the scope of the invention to those skilled in the art.

#As will be appreciated by one of skill in the art, the present invention may be embodied as methods, data processing systems, and/or computer program products. Accordingly, the present invention may take the form of an entirely hardware embodiment, an entirely software embodiment or an embodiment combining software and hardware aspects all generally referred to herein as a “circuit” or “module.” Furthermore, the present invention may take the form of a computer program product on a computer-usable storage medium having computer-usable program code embodied in the medium. Any suitable computer readable medium may be utilized including hard disks, CD-ROMs, optical storage devices, a transmission media such as those supporting the Internet or an intranet, or magnetic storage devices.

#Computer program code for carrying out operations of the present invention may be written in an object oriented programming language such as Java®, Smalltalk or C++. However, the computer program code for carrying out operations of the present invention may also be written in conventional procedural programming languages, such as the “C” programming language. The program code may execute entirely on the user's computer, partly on the user's computer, as a stand-alone software package, partly on the user's computer and partly on a remote computer or entirely on the remote computer. In the latter scenario, the remote computer may be connected to the user's computer through a local area network (LAN) or a wide area network (WAN), or the connection may be made to an external computer (for example, through the Internet using an Internet Service Provider).