Programmatically diagnosing the root cause of a problem in a computing system. Events are monitored within an operating system, and at least a subset of the events are logged to a log file. In response to the detection of error condition(s), a diagnostics module is invoked. The diagnostics module queries the log file to correlate events relevant to diagnosis of the problem, and identifies the root cause by evaluating the results of the query. Once the root cause of the problem is diagnosed, a resolution module corresponding to that root cause may be invoked to programmatically resolve the problem. The invocation of the diagnostic and resolution modules may be subject to policy rules. Furthermore, the logging, diagnostics and resolution modules may be automatically updated as needed.