Several implementations based on the JMX API include some support for "cascading" or "federation". The idea is that one or more "subagents" can have some or all of their MBeans proxied into a "master agent", where "agent" means MBean Server. The proxies may not have the same name as the proxied MBeans.

The proposal is to allow a "mount" operation, analogous to Unix filesystem mounting. If subagent S has an MBean X called "com.example:type=Whatsit", and S is mounted with name "sub" in master agent M, then M will have a proxy MBean X' called "sub/com.example:type=Whatsit". Accessing an attribute or operation on X' will cause the proxy to forward the access to X and return the result to the caller. Where a parameter or return value in X is or contains an ObjectName such as "com.example:type=Thing", the proxy will do the appropriate mapping so that the ObjectName is seen by callers of X' as "sub/com.example:type=Thing".

The complete details of cascading will be considerably more complicated than described here.