Techniques for managing information in a computing environment. Information
associated with components of the computing environment is obtained. Then,
from at least a portion of the obtained information, a determination is
made as to the existence of one or more relationships associated with at
least a portion of the components of the computing environment. The
determination of the existence of one or more relationships is capable of
accounting for a full lifecycle (e.g., including deployment, installation
and runtime) associated with at least one component of the computing
environment. Thus, techniques for managing runtime dependencies between
the various components of computing systems are disclosed which provide a
level of abstraction from individual systems and allow the computation of
service/component (wherein the component may, for example, be an
application, middleware, hardware, a device driver, an operating system
and a system associated with the computing environment) dependencies that
are related to end-to-end services, as perceived by a customer. By way of
example, the inventive techniques may be applied to a distributed
computing environment. The computing environment may also be an autonomic
computing environment.
