Sorry, I'm not really sure of the right way to ask this one so bear with me...

We have a web application that runs on a set of servers at a data center (not in our offices) We want to be able to somehow 'advertise' to our clients/users that the availability or response time of our servers has met a standard throughout the day.

I am being asked to come up with a standard metric that we can easily advertise on our login screen that shows current "standard response time" checked every x minutes.

My thinking is that I need to capture something like the results of a traceroute from a server (either in our office, amazon, etc..) to one of the data center servers and come up with a Red/Yellow/Green type of a notifier for the login screen to let the user know that our tests are responding normally and if they are having delay issues it could be their network or connection to the internet. We have lots of clients in rural areas that have poor connectivity and we are trying to let them know any slowness might be on their end, not ours.

I've got the LAMP stack to work with, but this could also be some other system all together as long as it can update the main server with the results.

I already have pingdom reports that are available, but that's a bit more than people want to read sometimes.

Any ideas on what I can do?