Whilst searching for a tool to allow me to view snort alerts without trawling logs, I came across a reference to script to inform nagios. The script was a waste of space, but Nagios is so useful I’m installing it anyway.
It is a network monitoring application, able to inform of problems and failures in network devices and services. It appears to be very flexible; I’ve had no problem hooking in my BSD, Windows and OS X servers, and anything I find important on them.
It requires Linux, so now I've got a virtual Centos server on my network too.