Mass production's effects on the cheapest way to get some things

We have a bunch of networks in a number of buildings, and as part of looking after them, we want to monitor whether or not they're actually working. For reasons beyond the scope of this entry we don't do things like collect information from our switches through SNMP, so our best approach is 'ping something on the network in the relevant location'. This requires something to ping. We want that thing to be stable and always on the network, which typically rules out machines and devices run by other people, and we want it to run from standard wall power for various reasons.

You can imagine a bunch of solutions to this for both wired and wireless networks. There are lots of cheap little computers these days that can run Linux, so you could build some yourself or expect to find someone selling them pre-made. However, these are unlikely to be a mass produced volume product, and it turns out that the flipside of things only being cheap when there is volume is that if there is volume, unexpected things can be the cheapest option.

The cheapest wall-powered device you can put on your wireless network to ping these days turns out to be a remote controlled power plug intended for home automation (as a bonus it will report uptime information for you if you set it up right, so you can tell if it lost power recently). They can fail after a few years, but they're inexpensive so we consider them consumables. And if you have another device that turns out to be flaky and has to be power cycled every so often, you can reuse a 'wifi reachability sensor' for its actual remote power control capabilities.

Similarly, as far as we've found, the cheapest wall powered device that plugs into a wired Ethernet and can be given an IP address so it can be pinged is a basic five port managed switch. You give it a 'management IP', plug one port into the network, and optionally plug up its other four ports so no one uses it for connectivity (because it's a cheap switch and you don't necessarily trust it). You might even be able to find one that supports SNMP so you can get some additional information from it (although our current ones don't, as far as I can tell).

In both cases it's clear that these are cheap because of mass production. People are making lots of wireless remote controlled power plugs and five port managed switches, so right now you can get the switches for about $30 Canadian each and the power plugs for $10 Canadian. In both cases what we get is overkill for what we want, and you could do a simpler version that has a smaller, cheaper bill of materials (BOM). But that smaller version wouldn't have the volume so it would cost much more for us to get it or an approximation.

(Even if we designed and built our own, we probably can't beat the price of the wireless remote controlled power plugs. We might be able to get a cheaper BOM for a single-Ethernet simple computer with case and wall plug power supply, but that ignores staff time to design, program, and assemble the thing.)

At one level this makes me sad. We're wasting the reasonably decent capabilities of both devices, and it feels like there should be a more frugal and minimal option. But it's hard to see what it would be and how it could be so cheap and readily available.