The statistics for a station with no listeners has reports for thousands of listens and hours...
That likely means that your monitoring script is doing something unfortunate like fetching the actual stream content rather than just fetching the status page.
Nodeping is one issue which understandably must open a connection to check it is alive
Opening the connection isn't the problem; making the request isn't the problem. Making a request for the actual audio stream *is* a problem, though, because then Centova Cast treats it as a listener. And arguably, it's correct in doing so; CC has no way of knowing what a random application at a random IP address is doing with the audio stream, and for all it knows, it really is someone listening to the stream.
If your monitoring script were to just hit the status page, it wouldn't be a problem because Centova Cast does not count status pages (and requests for other non-audio-stream content) as listeners.
Are there any workarounds?
Sure. I mean, ideally, your monitoring scripts wouldn't be making audio stream requests, and fixing that would be the best solution. But failing that, Centova Cast has long supported a LOCALIPADDRESS setting in /usr/local/centovacast/etc/centovacast.conf that specifies an IP address to ignore in the logs. A couple of months ago we extended that to allow a comma-separated list of IP addresses to exclude. Specifying your monitoring IPs in that list will make Centova Cast act as if those hits never happened.
In the most recent build we also added a LOGPROCESS_MIN_DURATION setting which can be used to specify the minimum length (in seconds) of a listener session before it will be considered an actual listener.
Some combination of these should do what you need.
The CC help desk were useless in the matter!
Do you have your ticket number handy?
Inaccurate Statistics Reporting