Apple Inc.

Robert Parks

Erwin Hom

Jonathan Thatcher

Mark Davidson

Alex Chen

Methods, program products, and systems for monitoring extrinsic processes are described. A monitoring process can monitor one or more target processes. The target processes can be extrinsic, e.g., not spawned by the monitoring process. The monitoring process reads a process registry to identify which processes among multiple processes to monitor. The monitoring process can send status requests to the identified target processes periodically to check whether the target processes are healthy. If a target process is terminated, the monitoring process determines whether the termination is normal (e.g., by a user), or abnormal (e.g., the target process crashed). The monitoring process can restart the abnormally terminated or hung target process.

Managing extrinsic processes

An administration server in a database management system retrieves log files in a plurality of formats from a plurality of clients through helper programs running on the clients. The plurality of clients can include Web servers, application servers, and database servers. The log files can be generated by software modules on the clients. An administration engine converts log entries in the log files into a unified format for display. The converted log entries can be stored in a log database. Upon a user request, the administration server presents the log entries to the user in a log viewer. The log viewer can display log entries originated from heterogeneous software modules in a unified view.

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Castro Valley, CA, United States of America

Robert Parks