Over the last year I've been slowly working on a similar system in my spare time (of which I have none). To do systems monitoring and reporting I'm using mod_perl on the front end and communicating with remote systems via XML::RPC. The XML::RPC server on the remote system runs local command via perl wrappers. These wrappers are now returning raw command output, but my next step is to have them convert it first to XML and then return it, where it can be stored in a DB (I use DB2) and/or processed by AxKit. I decided to go this way so I could delegate the customization of the local wrappers to other admins, because our site uses so many different platforms (AIX, Sun, linux, BSD, all stripes of Windows, OS/2, AS/400, OS/390, MacOS 9, MacOS X, etc etc). So far I've only been monitoring and reporting disk usage, just to get up and running.
Bill
