There's a lovely Perl-based "Tail file to IRC" example at CPAN dot org which I have used for a similar monitoring situation. Search POE::Component::IRC::Plugin::FollowTail.
I would just crank up the stat reading on the monitoring PCs so I wouldn't need a "run a manual stat reading" command. It's easy to summarize or discard data.
I might rather install Apache on my monitoring PCs so I could just pull the files via HTTP.
...or maybe just write the stats data to a local file *and* a network drive so that I can centrally monitor the network drive for things.
Probably what I'd do is simply syslog the data to my syslog server to collect all the monitoring data, and then use VNC (or RDP if installed) to restart things. If restarting was needed a lot, I'd fix that program! ...or just run a loop that restarts it every day/hour/minute--whatever makes it reliable.
But, if you are bent on the IRC client with C/C++, there's a client library at Sourceforge dot net. I'd be happy to use that and deliver your custom solution.