System and method for monitoring application availability

A method, in a data processing system, for monitoring availability of an application, comprising:

• measuring, in a deployed environment in which the application is running, one or more metrics associated with one or more resources utilized by the application, to thereby generate measured values for the one or more metrics;
• analyzing the measured values to generate a range of normal operational metric values;
• applying one or more generic percentiles, which may be applied to measurements of any of a number of different metrics and which define availability states of the application, to the range of normal operational metric values to thereby generate one or more availability conditions, wherein the generic percentiles are derived at least from the range of the normal operational metric values, and wherein the one or more availability conditions comprise structural conditions, capacity conditions, and behavioral conditions, and wherein the structural conditions include at least one of the application being present, the proper ports used by the application having listeners opened on them, a listener on the proper ports corresponds to the application, and a file system for the application is mounted;
• and
• applying the one or more availability conditions to collected resource metrics associated with resources utilized by the application to thereby determine the availability of the application.