A high level Operational Support System (OSS) framework provides the infrastructure and analytical system to enable all applications and systems to be managed dynamically at runtime regardless of platform or programming technology. Applications are automatically discovered and managed. Java applications have the additional advantage of auto-inspection (through reflection) to determine their manageability. Resources belonging to application instances are associated and managed with that application instance. This provides operators the ability to not only manage an application, but its distributed components as well. They are presented as belonging to a single application instance node that can be monitored, analyzed, and managed. The OSS framework provides the platform-independent infrastructure that heterogeneous applications require to be monitored, controlled, analyzed and managed at runtime. New and legacy applications written in C++ or Java are viewed and manipulated identically with zero coupling between the applications themselves and the tools that scrutinize them.