An intelligent help system which processes information specific to a user and a system state is described. The system incorporates a monitoring device to determine which events to store as data in an historical queue. These data, as well as non-historical data (e.g., system state), are stored in a knowledge base. An inference engine tests rules against the knowledge base data, thereby providing a help tag. A display engine links the help tag with an appropriate solution tag to provide help text for display.