I need to setup an SNMP monitor that is capable of alerting people if x or y problem occurs. My boss suggested using cacti (www.cacti.net) and although this will query SNMP agents for data and produce wonderful graphs, I have yet to read anything to suggest that it will alert you of a problem. Ultimately we want it to page our administrator if x problem occurs and email the IT department if y problem occurs. The program doesn't have to take care of this by itself. As long as there is a way for it to launch another program/script when x or y event happens then I can script the rest.

Thanks

There are plugins like thold which will do this, but plenty of other monitoring squites will also do this, without additional tools, e.g. nagios, opennms, groundwork, hyperic, zenoss and many many others.

If you don't want to get a suite, CPAN (Perl repository) has lots of modules to do stuff like emails, sms etc.