jtara - 3:48 pm on Mar 31, 2008 (gmt 0)

There are a bunch of packages to do this - one or more is probably included in your Linux distribution.

One popular one is called Nagios. There are plenty of others.

Here's the category listing on Wikipedia:

[en.wikipedia.org...]

These typically use a "mangement server" running on some Linux system (but sometimes Windows is supported as well) which really shouldn't be one of the systems under management. An either mandatory or optional client ("agent") may be installed on each system under management. They usually also do some monitoring (such as pings) that doesn't require anything installed on the managed systems. In some cases, they don't use a client, but simply make an SSH connection and a command shell.