Here is a script I wrote that runs under Maya Python terminal. It checks the time the workstation spends to connect to about 20 webpages, and updates a bar graph that it creates real-time.
I implemented multi-threading to the script which Maya Python supports to a point. That point is using maya.cmds library which includes all the maya commands with transformations and such in threads.
So I had the Python script to do its trick with multi-threading, then stored the results to be executed thru MEL in strings. And piped those strings back into Maya's MEL commandPort via the Python telnet module.
Script is not fine tuned and it is not bug free, but it works. It also may only work on a Mac station since I used the ping command built into Mac OS X and there are slight differences between systems.