An aspect oriented system for implementing system monitoring and tracing is provided in which the monitoring and tracing functionality needs not be coded into the resources being monitored or traced. Rather, an aspect is provided which encapsulates the monitoring/tracing behavior. This behavior may easily and transparently be forced onto the resource by compiling the object class for the resource along with the monitoring/tracing aspect. When the monitoring/tracing is no longer needed, it is removed simply by recompiling the resource object classes without the aspect.