As distributed systems become used in wider area of applications, many works has been done to invent more efficient way to manage the distributed systems. The client-server based distributed system management by using SNMP or CMIP has many problems such as scalability, interoperability, flexibility, and so on. Recently, it is evident that managing distributed systems using mobile agents have popularity, and the Java language helps the trend. However, the improvement of performance has to be analyzed when the mechanism of mobile agent is applied In this paper, we discuss a more efficient way to make use of the mobile agent mechanism for managing distributed systems, and propose an Agent-On-Demand (AOD) method. The core of the method is not to use the previous method that mobile agents doing management job is dispatched to the managed nodes by a manager application, but to make agents requested by the managed nodes and then the manager application send the requested agents to that nodes. This process is done through Hierarchical State Threshold (HST). Also we present a performance model for Java RMI and mobile agent, and compare the AOD method with the previous work in terms of network overhead and execution time.