Monitoring NT Services

[Winters, Jason]

I'm trying to setup Mon to monitor NT services running on Windows 2000 boxes.  Unfortunately, I have little experience with Mon or with network management/monitoring.   Has anyone found a way to monitor NT services reliably?  I've considered using SNMP; however, I haven't found any way to use SNMP to check the status of a running service.  I've considered using SNMP traps; however, this doesn't seem terribly reliable since the UDP packet could never make it to the server running Mon.  Using traps tells me something bad happened but it doesn't give me the sense of security that actually checking the services periodically would give me.   Has anyone else in the Mon community found a way to solve this problem?  If possible I'd like to implement something that doesn't require installing software (particularly commercial software) on all of my NT boxes.  Any suggestions, experiences, best practices, things to avoid, etc. would be greatly appreciated.   Thanks, Jason Winters