Obviousness

An analysis of obviousness under 35 U.S.C. § 103 typically requires identifying specific prior art references that, either individually or in combination, would have rendered the claimed invention obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art at the time of the invention. This analysis necessitates the identification of each reference's teachings and a clear motivation for combining them.

Absence of Specific Prior Art References for Combination:

The provided patent text for US8379538 includes a "Description of Related Art" section, which outlines the general landscape and deficiencies of monitoring systems preceding the invention. This section describes problems such as:

• Traditional monitoring architectures requiring manual configuration and re-configuration for changes in the monitored environment (e.g., adding metrics, moving applications, changes in file formats).
• Data collection agents providing monitoring data to statically configured repositories that presuppose metric identity and environment topology.
• Monitoring data repositories having schemas that do not tolerate changes and require manual maintenance.
• Monitoring tools also requiring manual maintenance by users to support changes in instrumentation systems (e.g., different metric names, units, or reporting frequencies).
• Reporting networks being insensitive to the behavior or configuration of the underlying monitored infrastructure, potentially impacting performance.

While this section effectively defines the problems in the prior art that US8379538 aims to solve, it does not provide specific patent or non-patent references (e.g., journal articles, specific patents by different inventors) that can be formally combined for an obviousness analysis. The general mention of "Hewlett-Packard's OpenView Reporter product" and "system activity reporter (sar)" serve as examples of existing products exhibiting these problems, rather than distinct, combinable prior art disclosures.

Furthermore, the "CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS" section lists several co-pending and commonly assigned U.S. patent applications (U.S. patent application Ser. Nos. 11/158,776, 11/158,868, 11/158,777, and 11/158,376). These applications are incorporated by reference into US8379538 and share the same priority date. As such, they are generally considered part of the same inventive entity's disclosure or patent family and would typically not be used as prior art for an obviousness combination against the claims of US8379538.

Conclusion Regarding Combinations of References:

Given that the provided "Prior Art section of this page" (interpreted as the "Description of Related Art") does not list distinct, combinable prior art references, it is not possible to formally identify specific combinations of references that would render the claims of US8379538 obvious under 35 U.S.C. § 103 with high confidence.

Inventive Step Over Described Prior Art Problems:

Despite the absence of specific references for combination, the patent explicitly details the inventive step over the general knowledge of the prior art as described in the "Description of Related Art." The core of US8379538's invention lies in providing a model-driven monitoring architecture that achieves autonomous adaptation to configuration changes, thereby overcoming the pervasive need for manual intervention in traditional systems.

Specifically, the invention introduces:

1. A machine-readable monitoring model: This model describes the configuration of both the monitoring and monitored environments.
2. Comprehensive configuration description: The model maintains information such as metric models (identifying collected data), meta-models (defining data structure), topology (interrelationships of elements), data consumer desires, and reporting network desires and objectives.
3. Dynamic updating: The machine-readable monitoring model autonomously updates to reflect changes in the monitoring or monitored environments.
4. Autonomous adaptation: Elements of the monitoring environment (e.g., monitoring tools, reporting network, monitoring sources) read this dynamically updated model and autonomously adapt their operations to the changed configuration, without requiring manual re-configuration by a user.

The motivation for a person having ordinary skill in the art to move from the described prior art problems to the claimed solution would be to address the documented inefficiencies, inflexibility, and potential data loss associated with manual configuration and static systems in dynamically changing environments. While the desire for automation was known, the specific architecture of a dynamically updating, machine-readable model that enables autonomous adaptation across various components of a monitoring system (including handling changes in metric definitions through meta-models and dynamically configuring reporting networks) addresses these prior art shortcomings in a novel way according to the patent's own description. The patent highlights that traditional solutions failed to provide such autonomous adaptability and dynamic understanding of monitoring data changes.