1. A method in a computer system for detecting an operating state of a component in the computer system comprising a plurality of components, the method comprising: transmitting a command line interface (CLI) command via a command line interface to the component; receiving an output character string from the component responsive to the CLI command; dissecting a of significant character substrings from the output character string, wherein each significant character substring comprises a label character string indicating a meaning of the output character string and a data character string expressing data of the output character string; setting a regular expression corresponding to each significant character substring of the set of significant character substrings thereby forming a set of regular expressions; calculating a difference between each of the set regular expressions and each significant character substring corresponding to the regular expression as a character string distance; comparing each calculated character string distance to a corresponding predetermined threshold; and outputting the operating state of the component based on results of the comparison.