AUTOMATIC BASELINING OF BUSINESS APPLICATION SERVICE GROUPS COMPRISED OF VIRTUAL MACHINES

An example method of automatically establishing a baseline of virtual machines operating in a network may include parsing service group ontology information stored of an established service group to determine components of a business application service group that are communicating with one another. The example method may also include tracking the current state of the business application service group to determine if any changes have occurred since a previous service business application service group configuration, and, if so, updating the ontology information to reflect those changes, and generating a list of candidate virtual machines that are candidates for participating in the established baseline.