We've got a lot of back-end applications that we need to monitor the performance of (metrics such as orders waiting to be processed, time since last run, etc). Currently, this is done by an in-house watchdog application that fires out emails whenever a threshold is exceeded, but there's no way to acknowledge an issue and squelch these alerts.

Rather than build our own complete alerting system, we'd like to tie in to the Zenoss installation we use to monitor our servers. I've found a few articles on creating events programmatically, but I'd rather Zenoss itself monitors the values that the current watchdog app is looking at (so we get the benefits of graphing and history as well).

Is it possible, then, to programmatically provide a data feed (rather than an event) to Zenoss? Or is there another way to go about this?