US Patent 7350100 Method and apparatus for monitoring data-processing system

A system management method and apparatus presents in real time an importance level of a job affected by a failure in distributed systems to make it possible to quickly deal with the failure and minimize business losses. The apparatus includes an integrated management unit (IMU) monitoring the distributed systems, a job influence manager which manages as predetermined information relations between jobs executed on the distributed systems and resources making up the jobs and which, in response to a query from the IMU, sends back information on the jobs affected by the failure event. The apparatus includes an importance level manager which calculates importance levels of individual jobs according to predetermined rules and evaluation formulas and sends back a job importance level in response to a request from the IMU. The event and the importance level of the job affected by the event is displayed in the IMU.