A constant monitoring and recovery system that enables the measurement of task usage/metrics and performance of software-based business applications. These metrics can then be evaluated by logic, in combination with each other and/or a timer, in a distributed environment. This is accomplished with the introduction of an extremely low overhead to the application host. The results of the logic evaluation can cause real-time and real-world responses such as application restart, interaction with load balancing equipment, or notification (via email, pager, etc.). Data can also be persisted to a database for later archival or evaluation, with the ability to reduce granularity over time. Specifically, an application manager monitors business application processes, notifies failure and automatically recovers software based business applications based on the logic of the underlying applications. The application manager comprises three main components that work together: Instrumentation API for setting up monitoring parameters; Event Notification and Automatic Recovery Evaluation Engine; Monitoring Console Server.