A system, apparatus, computer readable medium and method are disclosed for identifying underlying services of transactions in a service-oriented architecture (“SOA”)-based computer network. In one embodiment, a computer readable medium includes executable instructions to characterize messages communicating among services to form characterizations of the messages. Also included are executable instructions to determine dependencies using the characterizations of messages within a subset of the services. These dependencies can be represented as dependency links interconnecting the subset of the services that effectuate a transaction of interest. By identifying the dependency links, the underlying services in SOA-based networked computer system can advantageously be determined for managing the behavior of the subset of the services and other distributed services of the SOA-based networked computer system.