1. In an Information Technology (IT) Infrastructure wherein internal end-users or external customers rely on business services to submit business transactions involving an orderly sequence of application transactions along a plurality of IT Paths forming IT Aggregates, a method for managing impact of IT events on business services which comprises the steps of: (a) configuring a high availability management backbone; (b) defining a plurality of business objects; (c) defining a plurality of IT objects; (d) monitoring the IT Paths used by the application transactions to form monitoring information; (e) monitoring the IT Aggregates to supplement the monitoring information; (f) automatically abstracting the monitoring information into business impact information; and (g) using the business impact information to manage the impact of IT events.