US Patent 7257515 Sliding window for alert generation

A method for generating alerts from a periodically sampled system is disclosed. The method includes maintaining a sampling window having a predefined number of most-recently collected samples. The method further includes calculating an alert value, the alert value representing a ratio of a first value to a total number of samples in the sampling window, the first value representing a total number of samples in the sampling window having parameters exceeding a predefined sample alert threshold. The method additionally includes generating a first alert if the alert value exceeds a predefined alert threshold.