Abstract: Operational data is managed by a system. Real-time operational data is collected at a plurality of client systems. At each client system, the collected real-time operational data is normalized into a common format to thereby provide a plurality of common data objects, each common data object is qualified for an assignment of one or more tags based on qualification rules, one or more corresponding tags is assigned to each common data object, and the qualified common data objects are prioritized according to a predetermined rule to identify high priority common data objects and low priority common data objects. The high priority qualified common data objects are then sent to a central server.