A system and method is disclosed that installs an agent on a computer system that is configured to be automatically started at startup of the computer system and that is also configured to detect the startup of processes on the computer system. The agent determines the capabilities to monitor process starts that available on the computer systems and installs an appropriate process start monitoring procedure. The installed process start monitoring procedure detects the start of a process, installs a core agent into the execution context of the started process and manipulates the start sequence of the started process to initialize and start the core agent. On startup, the core agent analyzes the execution context of the started process to identify the type of application executed by the started process, and injects a special agent matching the identified type into the started process to perform application level monitoring.