How remote monitoring works -- without any agents at remote machine

Question

Using JAVA, Is there any way to execute a system level command on the remote machine and get back the data to the host machine.
It should work something like this, my application resides on Windows, and it should send a system command to the remote machine (Solaris) like vmstat and getback the resultant output to my application. This should be achieved without installing any agents at the remote machines.
Suggest me some good advice to design this application.

Answer 1

Most Unix boxes run a Telnet serverActually, if the sysadmins are smart, there's no
telnet server nor a telnet client in sight - they've
been removed and sshd is running. Most (if I
remember correctly) Linux distros now do not
install telnetd by default, but sshd is. I use
Linux/Solaris 100% of the time, at work and at home,
and I can't even remember the last time I fired up
"telnet."This is a good point and hints to the fact that any application must define and document
its dependencies. In this case the application must document that the appropriate server daemon
must be running for it to work, whether telnetd, rshd or sshd. No assumptions can be made about any
of these daemons as they can all be turned off and not running.
For this application to run the user must be able to turn on the required daemon at the required
server. This is not the same but somewhat equivalent to requiring the installation of a
specialized daemon at the server. In all cases the user must have administrative access to the server,
either directly or indirectly.