Disclosed is a software application reliability and availability tracking and reporting mechanism that collects event data from target computers, analyzes the data, and produces reliability and availability reports. A network administrator specifies target computers for which event data are collected. The collected event data along with a reliability model are provided to a reliability and availability analysis engine. Output from the engine includes reliability and availability data expressed as durations of time spent in each state and as associations with the events. The reliability and availability data are fed to a report generator which computes reliability and availability metrics. The metrics are used to generate reports that can be interpreted by the network administrator without the need for specialized data analysis skills. The metrics are also aggregated to provide historical and relative ranking reliability and availability data useful for planning and tracking against reliability and availability objectives.