An application or a portion thereof can be thought of as a container having a set of instruments with mathematical descriptions of relationships between the instruments and other portions of the application infrastructure. The set of instruments may include only those instruments determined to significantly affect or be significantly affected by an application or a portion thereof running within a distributed computing environment. Models can be generated to include those instruments that significantly affect or are significantly affected by the application or a portion thereof and their mathematical descriptions of relationships between those instruments. By using the models, portions of an application environment across tiers can be controlled in a more coherent manner to better achieve the business objectives of an organization. The methods and systems can also help to identify and correct potential problems that may not be seen when examining tiers or sub-tiers individually.