An information processing system that allows the user to exchange or share data via the Internet is widely used in companies and other organizations. This type of information processing system provides various operation services that meet user's needs. As more and more new services are provided or existing business services become more and more improved, an information processing system gets larger year after year.
On the other hand, the management of always keeping an information processing system running has become one of important management problems. This management, which requires special knowledge and technology, is generally entrusted to a special operation service company. Usually, an operation service company builds a monitoring system for managing the status of monitored devices and, using that system, always monitors the status of the monitored devices. In general, a monitoring system comprises two types of subsystems: one is a monitoring agent that is installed in each monitored device and the other is a monitoring manager that is installed in the monitoring device (for example, see Patent Document 1).
A monitoring agent collects monitoring data from a monitored device, where the monitoring agent is installed, according to the monitoring setting information that indicates what information on the monitored device is to be collected and how often and how it is to be collected, and sends the collected monitoring data to the monitoring device. On the other hand, the monitoring device sets the monitoring setting information in the monitoring agents, receives monitoring data, and accumulates the received data in the database. The monitoring setting information that is set in the monitoring agents is created in advance for each monitored device by the system administrator and is stored in the storage device. The monitoring manager reads the monitoring setting information from the storage device and sends it to a monitoring agent.
Patent Document 1: Japanese Patent Publication Kokai JP-A No. 2002-41327