DaB.:
You should read the file and parse the first line, that not beginns with "#". Then your tool knows, what's the status of cluster is. Is it "OK", you have to do nothing more, if it's "INFO" and "WARN", it's your decison if you display something. Is it "ERRO" or "DOWN" you must ("must" like in rfc 2119 [1]) give out the text. But that is the better decision anyway, because your tools did not work because the cluster is down :).
What about tools not using a fixed db (depends on user choose)? Also, being only a line i'd make it the first one.