1. A centralized diagnostics management tool facilitating monitoring of distributed components of a supervisory process control and manufacturing information application, the centralized diagnostics management tool comprising: a diagnostics management console shell comprising: a set of view templates, the view templates including controls for manipulating graphically displayed representations of data rendered by the distributed components, and an interface customization software interface for integrating an extensible set of software modules providing data links to ones of the set of distributed components; and a set of software modules that submit requests to the distributed components to access exposed attributes corresponding to operational status of the components.