So here's the scenario (oh, and new member to the boards even though I've been browsing here for eons) - two colo in Soverign House, and one colo in Meridian Gate.

Whats the sane way to have the Meridian Gate (a backup, 2ndary DNS, backup MX etc) monitor the services on the first two in S.H... I was thinking to just use Nagios or something, or even build some bash scripts and stick them on cron, however, its with the same provider, it's 'local' so there's only one or two hops to get to the server, if the server has services up, but no connectivity, the server will still say their fine.

Any way of checking externally to get a result from a third party site? Like DNSStuff.com, but obviously I won't script them.. Ie: routing out, via the internet just to check?

I heard Nagios can also monitor, but also, forward its information to another Nagios monitoring client elsewhere aswell. Like ns1 is monitored by ns2, but ns2, forwards monitoring info, to ns3 in another place, and so ns3, monitors ns1 and ns2.... but, Nagios isn't Win32 - and I don't have anything but Win32 at home...

Help :|
Or should I just pay through the nose and have all three servers monitoring by some external company? That'd be PING, SMTP, DNS, POP, IMAP, HTTP, HTTPS, FTP and a few custom TCP ports.. Per server. ouch... and I want SMS notification :(