A system monitors a network or web application provided by one or more distributed applications and provides data for each and every method instance in an efficient low-cost manner. Agents may monitor the performance of the distributed application by the web services and report monitoring data as runtime data to the remote server, for example a controller. The controller may analyze the data to identify one or more performance issues or “hot spot” methods based on current or past performance, functionality, content, or business relevancy. Instructions and/or configuration information may be transmitted by the controller to the agents that correspond to a particular business transaction portion associated with a hot spot. The portions are then monitored to collect data associated with the hot spot and the hot spot data is reported back to the controller.