Disclosed herein is a computer implemented technique for discovering the information technology resources that are involved in a particular networked business transaction. The system comprises three basic components. A robotic transaction playback client records the various steps in a particular transaction and can repetitively execute these steps to analyze the results. A network record collector observes the traffic throughout the network in response to the repeated instances of the transaction executed by the robotic transaction playback client. A backend processor analyzes the observations of network traffic to determine which ones are possibly tied to the transaction, and from this information determine which network components are part of the transaction being analyzed. Event timing information from a plurality of executions of a particular transaction are used to determine resource usage and paths.