A system and method can deploy and manage software services in virtualized and non-virtualized environments. The system provides a data consumer that manages a plurality of data collectors, wherein each data collector resides on one of the plurality of virtualized and non-virtualized machines in the computing environment and extracts performance data from a set of Virtual Machines running on a specific compute resource using an operating contract. The operating contract includes one or more metric descriptors, wherein each metric descriptor specifies one or more resources associated with the set of Virtual Machines. In addition, a push manager allows the data consumer to register performance data items that need to be handled, wherein the push manager calls the data consumer to process the performance data items at each time the periodic interval elapse.