Previously I took readers over the merits of Nagios, the Open Source

system monitoring tool.  For some people Nagios is too heavy and

requires far too much time and effort to configure; what’s needed is a

lightweight monitoring tool which can keep an eye on daemons and let you

know when things aren’t as they should be.  ‘monit’

(http://www.tildeslash.com/monit/) seems to fit the bill, it could also

make a useful companion to Nagios as it will detect a dead process and

restart it for you!  A handy HTTP interface is built in so you can check

on the system status from the comfort of a web browser.  Services can be

put in to groups for easy management, dependencies can be configured

between services and files/disks can be monitored.

All over this looks

like a useful little program (compiles to 200KB), I haven’t tried it yet

but intend to in the near future–maybe you can give it a try and let us

know how you got on?