title: Best way to implement a monitor for multiple servers/services
body: <p>I'm looking to create a monitor that will be in charge of keeping track of a bunch of different VM's (almost always ubuntu based). I plan on testing by sending requests, as well as testing if certain services are running on the specific VM's (this might need some sort of ssh component?). This data will be sent via a REST API to a cachethq instance. </p>
  
  <p>Some of the services I will be monitoring include: Jira, Confluence, Jenkins (and slave nodes), as well as a few other Atlassian suite products.</p>
  
  <p>I was thinking of writing something in python that would do this. Does anyone have any other suggestions that would be better? </p>
  
  <p>thanks</p>