Modern grids have become very complex by their size and their heterogeneity. It makes the deployment and maintenance of systems a difficult task requiring lots of efforts from administrators and programmers. Our goal is to investigate the concepts that underlie autonomic computing systems, especially for grid environment. We believe that peer-to-peer overlay networks are a valuable basis to support some of the main issues of autonomic computing in the particular case of grids. This article presents the construction of an autonomous, decentralized, scalable, and efficient grid monitoring system. The components of this application negotiate through a peer-to-peer network in order to provide autonomic behaviors and exchange data. We present a solution based on a gossip broadcast protocol upon a hierarchical, directed, and acyclic graph to rapidly diffuse information in the system while limiting the number of messages. The software architecture is detailed, and then the first results o...