This kinda depends on what you mean by status.

I am involved in Enterprise management where we need to monitor all sorts of servers Unix/Linux/NT, Databases and applications etc. Typically we have a piece of sofware (or agent if you will) that will send SNMP traps to our "manager" server. This would involve writing a piece of code to evaluate whatever metrics you want to monitor and possibly set thresholds against. If these thresholds are exceeded you can send a trap with the relevant info. On the other hand you may need to poll the device to check on specific info. This could be in the form of a ping or an SNMP get.

So if in status you mean "is it up/available on the network" it is a simple thing, use Net::Ping. However If you need more info about the OS or a process/application, things get a little more tricky, but nothing that can't be tackled without a little effort. :)

Update: I found this link which you may find interesting A Networked Machine Management System