exactly...MRTG will do all the data collection for you and you can show off nice uptime graphs. all you need is the mibs installed for what you want to monitor (via SNMP) over the TCP/IP network. microsoft supplies mibs for winnt/2k/xp server. once you have mrtg installed on the monitoring pc you install wincron on it to run mrtg every 5 minutes or whatever, to check the current values in the mibs on the servers. OR you could do something silly like write client/server perl programs yourself and install on each server and the client and hope they work nicely together over time. if you don't understand SNMP & mibs, then don't hesitate to learn this simple protocol and dive into using MRTG, which is also fairly easy to set up. you can learn SNMP and all about mibs in about 1 hour from a good TCP/IP book (a true TCP/IP networking book NOT a microsoft networking book which shows lots of screen dumps and crap)