In a distributed environment, managing applications remotely and gathering performance statistics is an important factor in simplifying the overall system administration. Java Management Extensions (JMX) have become a standard in achieving those tasks.

The OSGi Service Platform Enterprise Specification specifies a JMX Management Model (section 124), which defines an API for controlling the framework as well as simple means to exposing bundles and services.

At the point of writing of this book, the Managed OSGi framework (MOSGI) Felix sub-project is not yet released. However, it is an interesting project to keep an eye on (or contribute to) its progress. It provides, through JMX, functionalities such as:

It also provides an extensible graphical management console.

There are also other available providers of JMX probes and monitoring agents; a quick Google search will point you in the right direction.