US Patent 8099782 Event aggregation in a network

A network system can have a plurality of distributed software agents configured to collect events from network devices. In one embodiment, the agents are configured to aggregate the events. In one embodiment of the present invention, an agent includes a device interface to receive an event from a network device, a plurality of aggregation profiles, and an agent aggregate module to select one of the plurality of aggregation profiles, and increment an event count of an aggregate event representing the received event using the selected aggregation profile.