To achieve consistent health service measures, a method and an apparatus combine various metrics from both internal sources and external sources that relate to the service under observation. This service health information is generated independently from specific provider applications and performance monitoring tool sets, thereby allowing shorter time-to-market for service management solutions. The output of the method may be in the form of a programmatic or scriptable interface to be used by high-level performance monitoring tools that are capable of reporting status of many disparate computer services. The performance monitoring tools may reside on different systems and architectures and may be supplied by different vendors. As a result, the programmatic or scriptable interfaces are designed to be generic and flexible.