An apparatus, program product and method provide a generic error reporting and diagnosis framework that is readily suited for use in a wide variety of distributed computing environments, and that supports the autonomic reporting, diagnosis, and potentially the remediation of errors. The framework supports the encapsulation of symptomatic data associated with an error in a component of a distributed computing environment such that the encapsulated symptomatic data may be routed to an error processing facility, typically irrespective of the underlying nature of the error and the hardware and/or software platform of the component that generated the error. The error processing facility is in turn capable of routing the encapsulated symptomatic data to one or more diagnostic agents that are capable of processing the symptomatic data to prescribe a treatment for the error.