A wireless sensor network aims to collect data and, sometimes, control an environment. This kind of network is composed of hundreds to thousands of devices that have the capability of sensing, processing and wireless communicating, called sensor nodes. The sensor nodes are projected with small dimensions (cm/sup 3/ or mm/sup 3/) and this size limitation ends up restraining the node resources, like energy, processor and transceiver capacity. The task of building and deploying management systems in environments where there will be tens of thousand of network elements with particular features and organization is very complex. This task becomes worse due to the physical restrictions of these unattended sensor nodes. In this paper we have implemented and evaluated some automatic services of configuration and performance management, proposed by a WSN management architecture called MANNA. This architecture is based on the paradigm of self-management, which contains the automatic functions and services of management using a minimum of human interference. This work aims to evaluate different WSN configurations considering an application of continuous data sensing and dissemination, and the effects of the management solution proposed for this network. The built application does temperature and carbon monoxide concentration level monitoring, in an urban area. The results show the cost-benefit relations of the different organizations and demonstrates that management can promote the productivity of the resources and control the quality of the provided services.