Yet an other not-really-answering-your-question-but-may-be-intersting post, Nagios may be of interest to you (it's perl,which is good) and it uses `plugins' to find out the status of a remote box, then aggregates it all up, with graphs, and the like.

Oh, and i'm in no way aligned with Nagios, but a sysadmin friend of mine is in love with it

In reply to shameless plug for nagios by f00li5h
in thread How do plugins work? by pileofrogs

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