16. A computer readable storage device according to claim 13 , wherein at least one of said plurality of monitoring rules specifies an event to monitor.
13. A computer readable storage device having stored therein instructions that, upon execution by at least one processor of a computer system, cause the computer system to perform operations for generating a rule pack comprising a plurality of monitoring rules for monitoring a computer, said operations comprising: receiving said plurality of monitoring rules, said plurality of monitoring rules specified in a markup language, each of said plurality of monitoring rules associated with a respective one of a plurality of rule manifest files, wherein at least one of the plurality of rule manifest files includes a node comprising settings that are unique to a particular monitoring service; combining said plurality of monitoring rules to produce said rule pack, wherein said rule pack relates to performance criteria factors comprising at least one of average processor use, memory use, or percent of full disk space, wherein the combining comprises merging the settings that are unique to the particular monitoring service from the node of the at least one of the plurality of rule manifest files with generic health monitoring rules; adding to said rule pack at least one common setting that applies to two or more monitoring rules in said rule pack to specify how the two or more monitoring rules are applied, wherein adding to said rule pack said at least one common setting comprises evaluating a monitoring rule in said rule pack, determining whether a common setting applies to the evaluated monitoring rule, and, if so, adding the common setting in at least one common setting node; and converting said rule pack from said markup language to a binary file.