As you are putting the data into a database already, I would simply implement the whole stuff as a rule-checker on the database, that is, a SQL query is run against the database every 5 minutes to see if there has been a syslog update from the NT machine. If there is no such update, then either your script or the NT service is not running, and the support people are to be alerted - you could also send your service an UDP ping packet to wake it up and get it to put a "I'm alive" entry into the database.

perl -MHTTP::Daemon -MHTTP::Response -MLWP::Simple -e ' ;    # The  
$d = new HTTP::Daemon and fork and getprint $d->url and exit;#spider
($c = $d->accept())->get_request(); $c->send_response( new   #in the
HTTP::Response(200,$_,$_,qq(Just another Perl hacker\n))); ' #  web
[download]