I'd like to be able to discover and access available sensors (or metrics or attributes) and available effectors (operations) on components in my application.

For instance a WebServer might expose totalRequests as a sensor and updateWar(url) as an effector. It would be nice to be able to list these, query/subscribe to sensor values, and invoke effectors.

(I like the autonomic computing terminology – sensor/effector – but happy to follow JMX terminology – attribute/notification/operation – or others.)

This was raised by Alex Heneveld and was drupal issue # 1061