Help with a custom test script

[Q <q (at) tippett.com>]

Hello,

 I am new to writing custom scripts and looking for advice on how to 
write a test to monitor the status of a machine in our render farm. Each 
machine is broken down into a number of CPU cores. We have a command 
that displays the status of each core in the format per line of  
"<machine name>_<core number> in|out <partition name>" (i.e. testbox_0 
in testpartition). So here is the part I an trying to work out. A 
machine with 4 cores will produce 4 lines each with it's own status. I 
would like to to include all cores in one test. I would like to produce 
a YELLOW status if any core is labeled as out and RED if they are all 
listed as out. I would also like to make rrd graphs that shows the in 
and out time for each core. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Q