Determining when activemq broker is active

Is there a way (programmatically or otherwise) of determining when
the activemq broker as been successfully initialized and is available for
connections from clients?

I am writing an OCF script to manage activemq and one of the needs of OCF
is to determine from the managed resource (activemq broker in this case)
if the resource is active or not.

Programmatic: is there a way to send a (JMS) query and look for a response to
ascertain the avalability of the broker?

Oris there a file sytem artifact that the broker creates by which I could confirm that its
running?

Thanks,

/U