If you gave us some more background about what you are trying to achieve that would help. Are you after a full blown networked solution like nagios? Or do you just want to scrape some system information from one or two hosts? What OS support do you require? A quick search of CPAN turned up Sys::Info. Is that the sort of thing you're after?

Linux and Solaris. Mostly Linux. I'm not looking for a monitoring system, we already have one (nagios)). I'm looking to generate server documentation automatically. A script that'd traverse the system for as much useful information (iface configs, hostname, mem info, cpu info, serial # of the machine, packages currently installed, etc etc etc) and generate a huge wiki page out of it (or a series of wiki pages). I saw the Sys::* stuff on cpan. It's not portable enough (no solaris support) and the amount of information it gathers also comes nowhere close to facter. :/ Its a pretty big project: I'm going to run this on a few hundred machines. That's why I want to script this, there's no way in hell I'm going to write this much documentation by hand. And keep it up to date. Nope, no way....

The most comprehensive one I have seen is GLPI, that uses OCS inventory to gather the type of information you seek.