1. A meta-application system for managing a deployment of a software application, comprising: a computer system comprising one or more computers, said computer system programmed to implement at least: a non-transitory machine-readable repository of encoded knowledge comprising: a collection of deployment-independent rules describing problems associated with the software application, at least some of the rules comprising logical combinations of conditions individually satisfied by features of the deployment; and deployment-independent remedies for countering the problems; wherein the rules collectively comprise predicates, logical operators, mathematical operators, free variables, and constant terms, the logical operators including AND and OR operators; a monitoring component that collects data values of state metrics from the deployment, wherein the meta-application system is configured to derive at least one of the features from one or more of the collected state metric data values; and a problem detector that detects instances of the problems within the deployment, at least by programmatically using the features of the deployment to satisfy the logical combinations of conditions of the rules, the problem detector configured to satisfy at least some of the conditions by conducting pattern-matching between features represented as closed atomic formulae with constant term arguments and no free variables, and conditions represented as open atomic formulae with free variables.