What are the necessary periodic checks for server?
Solution 1:
IMHO, there's no need to re-invent the wheel. You have great tools like Nagios, Zabbix or Zenoss.
On the other hand, I'd also consider a RRTool trending/graphing tool like Cacti, Munin or Ganglia.
I'd also recommend to use both these tools with SNMP agents.
Hope this helps.
Solution 2:
You could build a small monitoring station...there're different products that you can setup in few minutes (zenoss, zabbix, pandorafms, nagios, etc). I think the most important thing to monitor are logs. For linux you could start with logwatch