I ran into a question at work surrounding service monitoring of our application at customer sites. We run into customers that have minimal IT staffs that lack the skills to properly administer a SQL Server database or even IIS. I'd like to be able to monitor performance numbers on a customers system and blast these numbers to a central server where an 'ops room' would be setup and we sell monitoring services - possibly outsourcing to another 'DBA light' type of firm. Once I have the data, I can set thresholds to notify monitors of things like low disk space, constrained processor utilization, etc.. I want to monitor the health of the database server and the .NET application running on the IIS box.
There are applications like Tivoli and OpenView that allow for monitoring, but they don't have the ability to easily transmit this data outside the companies network structure. The scope of these applications also goes much farther and the cost is consequently higher as well.
So my question becomes this: is there anyone doing a low-cost tool that collects data from PerfMon and transmits that data over - say - an HTTP/SOAP call to a central site? Ideally it's configurable to handle any variety of monitored values out of perfmon including custom application level monitors. If not, I think this could be a fairly interesting little opensource app I need to start. This would be a nice application of the WSMQ library.