Pinging Server Tool.

OK I have to monitor a bunch of servers ( roughly 1000 ).
Our old tool is going away, and I really liked it but wanted to get a little help writing a script that will check the up/down status of a server list.

say i have these.

server1
server2
server3

I want the script to ping by the DNS name, but get the names from a txt, csv, lst file. Dont matter to me.

I would like to have the script run once every 3-5 minutes, sending a very small packet to the servername. say 1-3 bytes. and only ask for 1 response.

the results i wish to be saved in a file NameofHTMfile.htm that I can set up to be autorefreshed later.

would this be a simple write up? it can be various formats, the script that is, bash, php, bat etc.

thanks in advance.

( i imagine someone has already written this. )

thanks again.