A protocol to enable management of opaque entities in a computing environment comprises an events component and a commands component. The events component enables a manager to utilize a received event communicated by a corresponding managed entity to indicate when administration or other management actions have occurred to domain information on the corresponding managed entity. The commands component interacts with the managed entities in response to the events component receiving corresponding events there from. The commands component further comprises commands for backing up the domain information stored by the managed entities as opaque configuration objects, for restoring the domain information to the managed entities as opaque configuration objects and for querying an identified one of the plurality of managed entities to determine whether two domain configurations are semantically different in a way that allows the configuration to remain opaque to the manager.