Weblogic has added some pretty cool functionality around health monitoring and automated recovery that provides out of the box functionality to define/administer recovery policies for failed VM,app server, JMS,JTA, and some other subsystems. I think this is particularly interesting. It is implemented around JMX and MBeans . See
http://edocs.bea.com/wls/docs70/admin_domain/monitoring.html#1028785
I'm wondering if anyone knows of equivalent functionality in jboss and/or what the recommended solution is for JBOSS in the area of health monitoring?