A system and method of characterizing the status of a complex system provide for determining a combined status level of a pair of related objects in an architecture, wherein one of the pair of related objects is a destination object and another of the pair of related objects is a source object. The combined status level determination can be cascaded through the architecture toward a front-end object corresponding to the pair of related objects to obtain a set of combined status levels. A status output may also be generated based on the set of combined status levels.