Currently tools cannot be aware about the physical quantities and units of measurement for JMX attributes. The JMC console uses a client side lookup for such metadata, and allows users to set these properties for arbitrary attributes. That is of course a very nice feature, but it would be even better if the developer of the MBeans could provide metadata explaining what physical quantity (e.g. length) and unit of measurement (e.g. meters) was used for a certain attribute.

This information should probably be provided in a typed way from the MBeanAttributeInfo, but could also be provided by establishing a convention for how to store the metadata in the Descriptor.

See JSR 363.