Any enterprise IT infrastructure contains numerous disparate components that are geographically distributed across various data centers. These components include both hardware components such as servers hosting different applications, network switches, routers, storage devices, and so on, as well as software components such as operating systems, database servers, application servers, middleware components, packaged applications, distributed applications, and so on. Although these components exhibit various management traits and expose multiple management operations, they also have certain common attributes that need to be monitored by the IT administrators. For instance, the performance characteristics of an Oracle database instance are completely different from those of an Oracle WebLogic managed server. However, both these components still exhibit a common trait of indicating their health or current state. This indicates if the corresponding component functions are available...