Methods for monitoring an application running on a server are described. Method steps include maintaining counters of statistics related to operation of the application, collecting first operational statistics based on counters from one or more application components, collecting second operational statistics based on counters from one or more application runtime environment components, updating aggregation statistics based on the collected statistics, and storing the statistics for access by a presentation agent which can interface with external monitoring tools. The nature and level of the collected statistics provide valuable insight into the operation of the application of interest.