An object oriented design for an automated modeling system for mapping and monitoring the business roles and impact of elements within an IT Infrastructure that make up specific applications or business processes, spanning not only network elements, hosts, servers and programs but also users, company structure and processes. The design including: a series of collector modules for collecting relationship, modeling and status information from IT specific sources used to build a model of the application or process in the database and to gather data about activities occurring on the computer network from a business impact perspective; a series of visualizer modules for reporting monitoring activities; a modeling database for storing information collected by the collector modules; a series of correlator modules for automatically determining relationships between data objects stored in the database to build application models of individual applications.