Infrastructure Monitoring

Hi all,

management currently has the idea (maybe injected by some nifty salesman ), that BSM consists especially of data gathered from systems with heart-beat like messages. In other words, they think about to implement as many systems, that can provide not only status changes from ok to faulty and back, but also send "ok"-messages in regular intervals to show, that the systems/services/agents/whatever are working fine.

Me and about every other technician here is thinking that this is some kind of overhead, a tad too much paranoia.
I asked a consultant, if that these heart-beat flood is really part of the "general" BSM concept and he said yes.
I checked the Wikipedia entry for this and didn't find anything that this kind of "paranoid message storm" is really needed to implement the thought/model of BSM into an IT-monitoring-infrastructure.

Does anybody have a hint or source to some document/website/etc, that points out that such "ok"-messages are part of monitoring in a BSM compliant environment?

I also checked this rather old publication IBM Business Service Managemet (2004) a bit as well, but all I have read so far doesn't point out clear to me that heart-beat stuff.

Thanks for any info.