1. A system for obtaining information about a managed deployment of a software application, comprising: a plurality of deployment platforms, at least some of which are running components of the managed software application deployment; a meta-application computer system comprising one or more computers, said meta-application system programmed to implement at least: a discovery component configured to use an initial deployment- independent abstract model of the software application to generate a context- sensitive application model of the managed deployment, by discovering information from the managed deployment and using the discovered information to populate the abstract model; a plurality of monitors, each monitor associated with a subset of the deployment platforms and configured to gather state metric data from said associated subset; and an analysis subsystem that generates requests for state metric data for specific state metrics from the managed deployment, based on deployment-independent encoded knowledge or based on deployment-independent encoded remedies associated with the encoded knowledge, the abstract model and the encoded knowledge being generated from analyses of reference materials for the software application being managed and empirical analyses done on a plurality of different deployments of the managed software application, the encoded knowledge describing known problems with the software application, the analysis subsystem configured to transmit each request for state metric data to a monitor associated with one of the deployment platforms that is associated with the request, the analysis subsystem configured to query the application model for deployment information necessary to transmit the requests for state metric data to appropriate ones of the monitors; wherein each monitor is configured to receive requests for state metric data from the analysis subsystem and collect state metric data responsive to the requests from the platform subset associated with the monitor; wherein at least some of the monitors are each configured to run a plurality of probes corresponding to multiple state metrics, each probe configured to gather data for a specific one of the state metrics; wherein the meta-application system is configured to receive updates to the encoded knowledge and/or the abstract model from one or more update servers.