Quick and Dirty Server Monitoring with Python

Sometimes you just need a quick and dirty script for monitoring servers to see if they are up. I wrote the following python script and have it running from cron so that it will notify me via SMS when a server's service isn't responding. The list of hosts is in a python dictionary with the key being the hostname or ip to monitor and the value being a list of service ports to check. If a host/port doesn't respond, it emails to the Sprint messaging service which appears on my phone. Any provider that has an email to SMS gateway should work. It isn't anywhere near a full fledged monitoring system but works well enough.