Newby question: Remote application Monitoring

[Holger Heimann <hh@IT-SEC.DE>]

Is there a way in Netview (or related parts of the product suite) to
remotely monitor the availability of standardservices like SMTP, POP3 etc.
on a particular server without a local agent?

I think of something like just doing a little protocol to find out if the
server is alive (for SMTP something like: "helo xxx" and wait for "250"
...).

Thanks in advance
Holger Heimann