How to determine server status?

Question

I have the following setup.

A webserver that is used for game menus, a game websocket client. A database that is used to keep track of initiated games and users statistics and more. A proxy connecting webclients to different game servers. A server application that controls game dynamics.

These things are situated on different servers.

Sometimes the game server has gone down due unknown reasons. I would like to write a script or similar that would try to connect to the proxy to see if the server is responding. I will use this script to display server status in the game menus. How should I write this script are there any do's and don'ts I should be aware of? Is it a good idea to write it as a script that for instance writes server status to a file and then allow the reading of this file from http request? Is there a preferred language to do this sort of stuff?

What im looking for is not software. Im looking for ideas or opinions on how to write such software.

Answer 1

This question should be on serverfault, under a supervision tag. Take a look at Nagios and you're good to go for most of your need