Aprisma Management Technologies, Inc.

Bill McKinnon

Eric S Rustici

Tim Newhouse

Apparatus and process for consolidating the visual representation of objects into a &ldquo;rollup&rdquo; visual representation. A set of objects defined in an N-dimensional space and a perspective viewpoint are obtained or pre-defined. Each object in the set is then represented by a new rollup object and each new rollup object is compared with any pre-existing rollup objects to determine if it is &ldquo;near enough&rdquo; to any pre-existing rollup object to be consolidated with the pre-existing object. If so, they are consolidated and the new rollup object is removed. The &ldquo;near-enough&rdquo; determination may be made based upon a threshold minimum area of occlusion between the two rollup objects, a threshold minimum pixel distance, or a threshold minimum spatial distance between the two rollup objects. In a preferred embodiment, the rollup objects represent managed network entities (devices and/or applications) in a computer network and the rollup process provides a convenient way to consolidate information regarding a plurality of managed network entities into a subset of rollup entities which visually represent a simplified network, within a network management software application.

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Antrim, NH, United States of America

Bill McKinnon