An execution environment accommodating object-based software transparently monitors interactions with software objects to generate operational management information for managing programs executing at plural computers. Notifications are directed to a software manager in the form of events, which can additionally be provided to applications or user programs. The software manager can group the events into sets and derive various operational management metrics from them to provide an overall picture of a program's performance, including availability. A hierarchical arrangement feature facilitates gathering information for programs scattered over plural computers. An alert feature provides warnings if metrics fall outside a specified threshold. In addition, the alert feature can automatically subscribe to additional sets of events to dynamically select the information collected by the software manager. Since the operational management information is collected transparently by logic outside the objects, manual instrumentation of the program is unnecessary, and software management technology is made available to organizations without software management expertise.