Abstract: Methods and apparatus involve continuous management of workloads, including regular monitoring, profiling, tuning and fault analysis by way of instrumentation in the workloads themselves. Broadly, features contemplate collecting current state information from remote or local workloads and correlating it to predefined operational characteristics to see if such defines an acceptable operating state. If so, operation continues. If not, remediation action occurs. In a virtual environment with workloads performing under the scheduling control of a hypervisor, state information may also come from a hypervisor as well as any guest user and kernel spaces of an attendant operating system. Executable instructions in the form of probes gather this information from items of the stack available for control and deliver it to the management system. Other features contemplate supporting/auditing third party cloud computing services, validating service level agreements, and consulting independent software vendors.

Abstract: Flow of data packets through virtual circuits in a multinode packet switching network is controlled by authorizing packets to enter and to leave each node. When a packet entering a node does not have an authorization (credit) to leave, it is placed in a pool of buffers common to all virtual circuits to await reception of an output credit for the virtual circuit. To avoid buffer congestion, a count is maintained of packets presently stored in and being processed through the node and packets that the node anticipates it will receive. If the count exceeds a predetermined threshold, a packet cannot get an authorization to enter the node unless it has a credit to leave. If the count is below the threshold, credits are granted for packets to enter the node even though there is no authorization to leave.