A technique for automated discovery of relationships between components providing a service and discovery of the relationship of shared components to other services. A discovery engine determines a management address for a component experiencing a problem and retrieves a TCP connection table for the component. It then identifies TCP connections that are either active or that were recently active. For each, the destination address is added to a global connection table. After the TCP connection table has been processed in this manner, the global connection table is traversed and TCP connection tables for each listed destination address are examined recursively. At the conclusion of this recursive process, the management table contains a list of management agents in the distributed system to which the original component had a TCP connection, either directly or indirectly.