Dan, have you looked into Nagios (http://nagios.org/) as far as a 
homebrew monitoring solution goes? At my previous job (working for 
a regional ISP) we used Nagios to send SMS pages and emails for 
any systems that we wanted monitored. If there's a function or 
stat you want monitored, there's probably a plug-in for it 
(http://www.nagiosexchange.org/).

Cheers from Cleveland and Go Gators,

--
Bill Carlisle