Re:OVERKILL, is what it is. (Score 2, Insightful)

If you're doing your own monitoring (on a small level), I've found a program that I really like, Host Monitor by ks-soft.net. It allows you to not only do simply ping testing, but also test against databases, webservers, odbc connections and much more... it's pretty nice, and comparatively inexpensive. As far as the timing of the checks, I use three levels. 1. For production severs, I perform my tests every minute or so, including http get tests, pings, database connects to make sure things are up. 2. For internal but mission-critical servers, I test every five minutes, and these are mostly just pings. 3. For secondary servers it becomes every 10 or 20 minutes. One of the nice things is that through normal daily use, the testing seems to 'normalize' itself so that everything wasn't happening at once. Testing intervals should be counted from the end of the previous test so that things don't bunch up.