Not a Perl solution and it sounds likes you have a short time table so I would suggest ServersAlive

It is PC based and it is very good and monitors many things. You can use it free for 10 things monitored. The software costs $99 US. I have it watching a couple hundread computers for availability, disk, services, and processes. It has a paging/email function and you can have it attempt restarts, etc.....

Doing it in Perl is fun but if you have a timetable "do it or else!" It's a question of how much you will cost versus buying something. If something is available, good, and it's cheap, why write something?

I know I am probably speaking blasphmy here! ;-)