jcmd and the underlying diagnostic commands built into the JVM offer significant information about the operation and state of the JVM, however their utility is greatly curtailed as their output format is not well specified nor is it easily consumed by programs or scripts, requiring ad-hoc parsing of the textual output that can vary between versions.

The utility of jcmd's could be greatly improved by adopting an optional format than would encode their output in such a fashion as to make it more programmatically consumable, e.g JSON, YAML etc.