System and methods for robust discovery of servers and services in a heterogeneous environment

The present invention is contained in a system for facilitating the identification, discovery, and monitoring of servers and services within a distributed network. The present invention is a system for dynamically discovering all of the servers and services on a network. The dynamic discovery of servers includes first enumerating all of the domains within a network and second enumerating all of the known servers in each of the discovered domains. Next, the system acquires and stores additional server contact information necessary to robustly connect to the server. Finally, the system determines the role of a server in a specified domain within a network. The system will continually monitor the connections to the servers and may use the server contact information to connect to a server or service when a network failure occurs.