Wolfgang is writing about a new component available in the latest release of Synthetica Addons called System Monitor:

If you’re interested about details on how to fetch the system information, look at this article i’ve written a few weeks ago for java.net. While some information is available in the System and Thread classes, you can access much more using JMX MBeans, including the information on threads and memory.

Note that with JMX, you can get the information not only on the current JVM, but on any running JVM that supports JMX. For now, it looks like the System Monitor component only allows tracing information on the current JVM (but i might be wrong).