I have been looking around to see if there is some simple, stand-alone(ish) agent/server setup that would allow a ping to be launched from a host with an agent on it. When I say "ping," I mean via icmp echo and/or tcp port check. I have Windows, Linux, and AIX systems that would get such an agent.
I would like to set up a central server with authentication that can issue pings from any device that has one of these agents. The primary use would be VPN testing, so that traffic can be initiated from a device that I don't necessarily have access to.
It seems that some monitoring software has this (e.g., Zabbix) but I don't want to go through the pain of installing a whole big piece of software like that just to get this functionality.
Almost all our AIX and Linux systems have perl installed, so that could be a nice option if I had to write my own. I would rather find something "tried-and-true" though...
I didn't realize that we already had SaltStack installed on almost all our servers (I'm a network guy, not a server guy). Once I talked to one of the server administrators, he showed me how this could be done using Salt.