A system for generic, run-time adaptive placement of byte code instrumentation takes into account object oriented inheritance relationships that are stored in an inheritance repository. The inheritance repository, which mirrors the structure of the monitored application, is created at run-time and is updated if the code base of the monitored application changes either dynamically at run-time or by manually changing the configuration and restarting the application. The inheritance repository contains meta-data of application classes and their relationships, like direct and indirect inheritance. The inheritance repository information is used to evaluate generic instrumentation placement rules, like rules that match to methods of classes that inherit from a specific base class. The inheritance repository is generated concurrently with instrumentation placement at application load-time or run-time and persists between application runs to enable dedicated adaptation runs to create the repository.