DETAILED ACTION
Notice of Pre-AIA or AIA Status
The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA .
Status of Claims
This office action is a response to a preliminary amendment filed on 01/10/2025. Claims 1-20 are cancelled, and claims 21-40 are newly added and presented for examination.
Claim Objections
Claim 29 is objected to because of the following informalities:
Claim 29 recites “whether the payload was successfully processed successfully” but should read “whether the payload was successfully processed”.
Appropriate correction is required.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 101
35 U.S.C. 101 reads as follows:
Whoever invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent therefor, subject to the conditions and requirements of this title.
Claims 21-40 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 101 because the claimed invention is directed to a judicial exception (i.e., a law of nature, a natural phenomenon, or an abstract idea) without significantly more.
Claims 21-40 fall within a statutory category because they are directed to a system, method or device. However, the claims recite an abstract idea, namely a mathematical concept.
Independent claims 21, 36 and 40 recite calculating a success rate based on numerical metrics including numbers of unsuccessfully processed payloads, numbers of received or processed payloads, numbers of payloads processed within a time period, and/or amounts of processing time. The claimed success rate is a mathematical calculation performed using collected metrics data.
Independent claims 21, 36 and 40 do not integrate the mathematical concept into a practical application. The additional limitations in the claims include a processing system, memory, a service pipeline, payload detection, metrics data collection, metrics data aggregation, and an action performed based on the calculated success rate. These elements merely use generic computer components to collect service metrics, organize or aggregate the metrics, perform the mathematical calculation, and perform a result based action. The claims do not recite a particular improvement to computer functionality or service pipeline operation.
When the abstract idea is considered both individually and in combination with the additional claim elements, the claims do not amount to significantly more than the abstract idea itself. The processor, memory, service pipeline, payload detection, metrics collection, metrics aggregation, and result based action merely apply the success rate calculation using generic computer components in a service monitoring environment. Claim 40’s recitation of terminating execution of an executing process also does not add significantly more because the claim does not recite a specific technical mechanism for terminating the process or a particular improvement to the service pipeline. It merely recites termination as a generic result triggered by the calculated success rate.
Accordingly, claims 21, 36 and 40 are directed to a judicial exception, namely a mathematical concept, and do not recite significantly more than the judicial exception. Therefore, claims 21, 36 and 40 are ineligible under 35 U.S.C 101. The dependent claims fail to obviate such rejections and are themselves rejected as being directed to patent-ineligible subject matter for they are also abstract ideas.
Allowable Subject Matter
Claims 21-40 would be allowable if rewritten or amended to overcome the rejection(s) under 35 U.S.C. 101, set forth in this Office action.
The following is an examiner’s statement of reasons for allowance:
The best prior arts the Examiner found were:
Nee et al. (US 2022/0086075) which discloses a service-oriented system in which services interact by service requests which proceed downstream through the services ([0017]-[0018], [0036]-[0039]). Each service collects and aggregate traffic metrics related to requests, and sends metric messages to a traffic collection system ([0021]-[0023]). Using the metric messages, the traffic collection system generates traffic maps that show the flows of requests from service to service, and indicates traffic metrics such as call volume, latency, error rate or success rate for individual service hosts, fleet of service hosts for particular services, and/or sets of services ([0022], [0026]-[0027], [0045]-[0047]).
Zhang et al. (US 2018/0212819) discloses obtaining KPI information for service processing units, where the KPI information includes “a quantity of service requests received by the service processing unit” and “a quantity of service failures corresponding to the quantity of services requests ([0052]-[0056], [0084]). Zhang calculates a service success rate by subtracting failures from requests, dividing the difference by the requests, and multiplying by 100% ([0085]-[0086]). Zhang compares the service success rate to a reference value to identify a faulty object and, in response, determines a troubleshooting policy such as reset, isolation or switchover ([0087]-[0096]).
Other relevant prior arts are as follows:
Baines et al. (US 10223179) discloses a message/request passing through multiple processing nodes. Each node reports start/finish time. The system estimates the total processing time through the nodes and throws a timeout error when the timeout period is too small ([0003], [0024], [0028]-[0029], [0051]-[0058]).
Zelek et al. (US 2014/0047000) discloses calculating success rate from request success/failure results. Success rate may be successes over total successes + failures. Timing between requests may be adjusted based on that success rate ([0022]-[0027], [0032]-[0035]).
Hulick (US 2019/0132289) discloses using health rules based on response time and error rate. Health rule violations trigger remedial actions. An agent may block/deny/prevent/terminate an outbound connection call ([0055]-[0056], [0131]).
Kuchibhotla (US 2021/0400115) discloses assigning operations to processes, computing operation success rate from successful completions, and canceling/delaying or halting pending/in process operations when a success threshold is not satisfied. Kuchibhotla also tracks average processing time and delayed operations ([0131]-[0134], [0163]).
These prior arts, individually and in combination, do not teach the claimed invention. In particular, the prior arts do not teach “wherein the success rate is calculated based on a number of payloads unsuccessfully processed by the first service and a number of payloads received by each service in the service pipeline” as recited in independent claim 21; “wherein the success rate is calculated based on a number of payloads unsuccessfully processed by the first service and a number of payloads processed by the service pipeline within a predefined time period” as recited in independent claim 36; and “wherein the success rate is calculated based on a first number of payloads unsuccessfully processed by the first service and an amount of processing time used by each service in the service pipeline to process the payload” as recited in independent claim 40.
Any comments considered necessary by applicant must be submitted no later than the payment of the issue fee and, to avoid processing delays, should preferably accompany the issue fee. Such submissions should be clearly labeled “Comments on Statement of Reasons for Allowance.”
Conclusion
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to LESA M KENNEDY whose telephone number is (571)431-0704. The examiner can normally be reached Monday-Wednesday 9:30 am - 5:30 pm ET.
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If attempts to reach the examiner by telephone are unsuccessful, the examiner’s supervisor, Umar Cheema can be reached on (571) 270-3037. The fax phone number for the organization where this application or proceeding is assigned is 571-273-8300.
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The examiner also requests, in response to this Office Action, support be shown for language added to any original claims on amendment and any new claims. That is, indicate support for newly added claim language by specifically pointing to page(s) and line no(s) in the specification and/or drawing figure(s). This will assist the examiner in prosecuting the application.
/LESA M KENNEDY/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2458
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