Is SNMP polling allowed on the external node? If so, click on 'List resources' for the node and change the 'Status & Response time' option from ICMP to SNMP
Well, I prefaced with "Is SNMP polling allowed on the external node? If so..". If SNMP isn't allowed, then the rest of the suggestions don't apply
Presumably? What if I presume you could hop on the next plane, spend a couple of weeks here and fix all my NPM and SAM problems for free? (I'll supply a daily pizza...)
Even if I could jump on a plane and fix all the problems for free, I don't like pizza
Some of them allow pings and I wanted to see if I could avoid writing a script for it.
You can use a WMI query to ping a host using the Win32_PingStatus class. You can import this template to get you started