Thanks for your input. I have been trying to wrap my head around the best way to do this. The problem I have is that even though there has not been a message from the device for hours it doesn't mean there is actually a problem, it is more likely that there is NOT a problem in that case. It would be nice if there was a periodic "keep alive" type message from the device but I am not that lucky.
Simply put, the device shoots out a message on a IP port whenever there is an error event and only then. It does not care if there is 1 or 100 devices monitoring the port either