I'd never heard of Nagios before (I'm kindof just now learning to crawl out from under my rock), so thanks for the link. I've used mon, which is probably the ancient ancestor of Nagios.

I'm not so much looking to monitor services, as I want to keep tabs on all my scripts, hence the idea of a perl module. For instance, if the script that creates web accounts horks or even just has a few grumblings, I want an email about that.

I'm not so much looking to monitor services, as I want to keep tabs on all my scripts

I would say that those are both the same thing. You want to make sure that if something fails you hear about it.

Nagios can work in active and passive mode. That means that it can actively check that services are running (like a webserver), or it can passively listen for problems (ie a script has a problem and sends a notification to nagios).

Also, Nagios handles all of the emailing/paging for you, and can control how many messages are sent, you can even configure it to send messages to a different group of people on the weekend, or at night. In other words, the problems you are trying to solve have mostly been solved for you already.

The part that you would need to write, is a simple interface module in perl that can sent alerts to nagios. That would be quite useful I think.

Even if you decide to write everything yourself, at least have a look at Nagios so that you can see the types of features can be useful in a monitoring system.