From: Kennedy Clark [mailto:hkclark at gmail.com] > > Great thread. Thanks to all for their input! > > Bryan asks a good question about whether we are looking for a > full SNMP tool. Actually, we have some pretty big systems > that already handle those functions. For this project, we > are just looking for ping-type "is it up or down" information > on a "subset of the overall network." > > It looks like Jacob's recommendation for Mon could be spot > on. But, that being said, OpenNMS and Zabbix look pretty > cool and worth a look (possibly for other projects with more > complex needs). Re a script, I was going to do something > like that if I couldn't get anything here :-) but I was > trying to avoid having to add in the "don't send and email > every time it checks during a prolonged outage" (just send at > the beginning and maybe the end). I'll second the recommendation of Mon. It is simple and powerful with very few requirements. Mon.cgi will give you web-based access to the status information. It also has the advantage of being written in Perl, so making minor changes to the monitoring or alerting routines is very easy. The logic to only notify once (or twice, or three times) per outage is built-in. You can also change the notification routines based on the time of day and/or day of the week. For instance, I set mine so that it doesn't bother notifying me about scheduled daily reboots of some of the servers. Bowie