[Asterisk-Dev] "Make phone call on demand" using AGI?

[Brian Capouch]

I hope this doesn't sound dumb. . . I would like to try to send a 
command to asterisk (or otherwise invoke an instance of asterisk) to 
make a phone call to a given number, and then play a voice file.

What I'm after is the ability to have my "systems up" monitoring 
apparatus make some calls in case there are problems.  Ideally, I could 
choose the message based on input from the monitoring program.

Is this going to be heavy-duty programming, or might there be an example 
of such out there somewhere?

Thanks.

B.