Method and system for automatic detection of monitoring data sources

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.