1. A computer-implemented method for monitoring computational resources within a data processing system, the method comprising: receiving at a monitoring service a non-application-specific request to perform a monitoring operation to gather information about usage of a computational resource within a data processing system; automatically selecting, by the monitoring service from a set of monitoring applications, a monitoring application that is able to perform the monitoring operation on the computational resource; and sending, by the monitoring service to the selected monitoring application, an application-specific request that identifies the computational resource and indicates the monitoring operation to be performed on the computational resource.