Confirming that Active Roles is still online

Hello,

Was wondering if anyone might have ever done any work in trying to develop a process for confirming that a given Active Roles server service is still online and responding. While we can of course look to see that the Windows Service is running, this does not tell us if the service itself has perhaps become unresponsive. In short, we need a way to "ping" the service and have it provide some kind of response. It doesn't matter what the response is, just that we get one.

Using the ADSI provider, or any of the QAD cmdlets is not an option.

I thought, perhaps, that we might be able to connect to the service via the WCF framework (the endpoint URI that I found was net.tcp://servername:port/activeroles/1), but thus far I've not made any progress going down that path. SVCUTIL reports:

The socket connection was aborted. This could be caused by an error processing your message or a 
receive timeout being exceeded by the remote host, or an underlying network resource issue. Local 
socket timeout was '00:05:00'.

An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host

My understanding is that WCF services may opt to publish their metadata via HTTP or MEX; presumably Active Roles is not publishing such information, which would cause SVCUTIL to fail, and means that I would not be able to interact with the service in this manner.

It's also possible that I'm overcomplicating things here, and someone else has a technique that is much simpler?

Thanks for your time!