• We did something like this at a previous employer. We ended up monitoring so many servers and so many processes we had a consolidated display with stoplights. Green lights for the things that went according to schedule, yellow if there was a nonfatal, and the loudest meanest red for when things went bad. Its easy to see at a glance when there is something that needs your attention. You can put the messages on tooltips or on another link drilling down by clicking the stoplight. Dedicate a monitor to the display and updated it once a minute.

    Since the web site was all database driven it didn't matter what was used to create the data, just had to make the check and put it into the database. Some of our monitors were scheduled sql jobs, some were vb applications and some were in c++. They all fed the same database with status information and timestamps.

    heck, we even went so far as to set up monitoring on all the monitoring programs 🙂

    This is a GREAT idea for a busy administrator!