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.