Get started with monitoring health of Java application on server

Question

I am completely clueless about this topic and never done it before.
How to get started with monitoring health of application on server(JBoss/Tomcat) as a programmer's perspective?
I have read about using some third party tools but I am still not clear about this. Do I have to write JMX Beans? So that any third party tool can plug-in to application server and get the stats.
Do I have to profile my application or something like that?

Please provide tutorials/blog links which can help me understand it more.

Answer 1

http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/technotes/guides/management/agent.html See aslo link of PeterMmm above.