Interestingly, we do something almost identical using Salt for service discovery (hey, it's built on ZeroMQ, too). We periodically ping all minions and record s

Interestingly, we do something almost identical using Salt for service discovery (hey, it's built on ZeroMQ, too). We periodically ping all minions and record some information about them that gets provided as pillar data such that we can write out databases hosts and such into environment variables when configuring hosts.