Recently we’ve been doing research in the application of Java Management Extensions (JMX) for software manageability. We’ve put together a whitepaper with practical examples and best practices.

From the introduction:
This white paper will outline some of the technical challenges when dealing with manageability
issues in software systems. The main focus will be on the JMX standard, which is the de facto
manageability standard in the Java world. At first, this paper will start with outlining the
technological aspects of JMX by introducing the API with a simple test case, showing the ease of
adding new management functionality to a pre-existing system. Another chapter outlines some
of the common design decisions which have to be taken when developing a management
solution, such as when to use manageability features and what internals of the system to
expose. Finally, some insights on various JMX management agents will be given.

Full text: Using JMX for software manageability