The growing complexity of distributed systems makes it more and more difficult to manage them. Therefore, it is necessary that such systems will be able to adapt autonomously to their environment. They should be characterised by so-called self-x properties such as self-configuration or self-healing. The autonomous detection of failures in distributed environments is a crucial part for developing self-healing systems. In this paper, we introduce algorithms to form monitoring relations and propose to utilise these for a scalable autonomous failure detection. The evaluation of the developed algorithms indicates that they are suitable for complex, large scale and distributed systems.