Java Servlet to start & monitor a polling process

I have a Web app that contains a polling process (infinite while loop) that is started up by a Servlet when the Tomcat service starts up.

<load-on-startup>0</load-on-startup>

Which works fine.

If this were a Unix process then I could check it on the command line using:

ps -ef | grep <myProcess>

Is there anything (simple) that can be used in a Servlet to monitor the status of my Polling process?

EDIT

To clarify, all I really want to see is that the process is still running and hasn't stopped.

IMHO, you should not use a Servlet for that use case, but a ServletContextListener. In its contextInitialized(ServletContextEvent sce), the listener should :

• start the polling service thread
• put in a ServletContext attribute an object containing state (last operation date, number of operation per ...) from the polling thread (and having a synchronization mechanizme)

Then, the listener could stop the polling thread in its contextDestroyed(ServletContextEvent sce), and any servlet (including JSPs) could get the state of the polling thread from the ServletContext.