Data center cartography bootstrapping from process table data

One embodiment provides a method including identifying all computing nodes and connections associated with the computing nodes in a data center based on running processes in the data center that communicate with one another. For each computing node, running processes are identified using natural language processing (NLP) by: iteratively refining a rule set that enables processing of surveillance information from the data center into an initial map of systems and applications in the data center, and extracting known process entities according to predetermined rules from the rule set. A visual dependency representation of the computing nodes and the processes running on the computing nodes is generated.