Ping only devices

I was also going to note that internal service checks are the solution, with the caveat that you have zero ability to control the alert format for specific instances -- there is only one global service alert template.  With Ping_Multi-, you can at least clone it and generate a custom alert (except you can't reference the WILDVALUE token, which is super annoying).  Since LM is on this thread, I will also point out that the Service functionality is only a small subset of what other vendors provide (e.g., Pingdom) with either the same or higher per-device cost.  I would love to see improvements in alert handling as well as for check scope (more than just port 80/443 for HTTP and general port checks, to name just a couple).