Object middleware, such as CORBA, is rapidly gaining acceptance as a means for cost effective and fast development for a wide range of applications in various areas of industry. State-ofthe-art CORBA implementations and standardized components allow for the development and operation of bigger and more complex systems. The growing size and complexity of distributed systems demands for a significant improvement of the methods and tools to manage these systems. Management of CORBA based systems comprises both the ORB supporting the interactions between the components, and the management of the individual components themselves. In this paper, we look at concepts and technologies to solve this management problem in a generic way. Our objective is to extend the ORB and components in a standardized way in order to provide the instrumentation to monitor and control them. In fact, we introduce the notion of management transparency and develop a management system for ORB-based systems that is tr...