Invention manages underlying application objects that support implemented business functions. A performance manager accesses and interprets application metadata and execution environment metadata, using a hierarchical entity to model complex relationships between application abstractions, components and resources. The performance manager encodes common behavioral and architecture information in models resulting from analysis of component architecture standards, vendor application servers, development tools and administration tools. The performance manager conducts inter-component dependency and control flow analysis, for example by generating control flow graphs from application metadata and performing byte code analysis without access to application source code. The performance manager collects metrics from standardized and vendor-specific sources, instruments interpreters (such as the Java Virtual Machine), and collects and utilizes resource metrics, code performance metrics, configuration parameters, and transaction, failure and lifecycle events.