Abstract: In this paper we present an entropy based method to analyze complex systems. Systems are treated as black boxes, which only expose information by some specified parameters. To decide whether a system shows self-organizing behavior in terms of the specified parameters, the calculated entropy values are preprocessed using low-pass filters. The time derivative of the smoothed entropy curve is used to analyze the short-term behavior of the system. A larger filter is used for the analysis of the long-term behavior. Different evaluations show that in principle self-organizing behavior can be recognized with our approach.