A conventional business enterprise has a number of departments each
depending on an information processing infrastructure. Operational
anomalies in the information processing infrastructure may have a
detrimental effect on one or more of the business processes. A rule
engine associates network events with the business processes which the
network events impact. The rule engine identifies and processes relations
between event-generating manageable entities on the network. The rule
engine computes, based on the relations between the various manageable
entities, manageable entities having an effect on other manageable
entities. Upon occurrence of an event, the rule engine employs the
relations to determine which other manageable entities are indirectly
affected by the event. The rule engine reports the event and affected
manageable entities to identify the business processes which experience
resulting operational deficiencies.