Remote pollers and notifications

[KevinNoall]

I'm a little unsure where to post this as it includes a number of topics I believe.
Here is my question/situation, apologies this is a bit long, TLDR below...
We have a multi-site cacti system with 15 remote pollers. The main cacti db/server is in a datacenter with a remote poller at each physical site. We poll most of the local resources with the poller in each site. This is great for distributing load, but the problem is, when a site loses it's connection to the main db/server it is not reported as down, it's just silently offline with Cacti showing whatever the last status was.
We poll the remote firewall and cacti remote poller from our main db/server so that we can get up/down notifications on at least some devices, but the issue with that is we lose any graphing during the time the site is offline. It could be, and usually is, that most/all of the devices are still online it's just that a VPN dropped or something.

TL:DR - How do we get notifications of a down remote resource when it is behind a remote poller and the connection to the main cacti db/server is interrupted. When the remote poller loses connection it fails silently and the last status is used for all its child monitors.

[TheWitness]

Can you add a bug at GitHub to notify the admin periodically when a remote data collector goes into heartbeat status? It's a simple fix actually. Our notification come in the form of an Email, though we can also log to the Cacti Log which can drive a syslog event that you can then perform notification from using Pager Duty or whatever you want.