Gossips is a modular client/server based system monitor. It uses distributed monitoring tasks to define and report states of an IT-environment. A monitoring task includes probes to measure data and a test to evaluate them. Gossips does not only report problems, it can also suggest solutions to the problems by consulting a knowledge-base, which is maintained and easily extended by the system managers using the local system. The monitor software is easily extensible through a flexible plug-in system for tests and probes. The monitor software is written in object oriented Perl which allows new tasks to inherit large parts of the existing infrastructure of the program.