Software/Hardware failure

I have a number of business critical applications running on an iSeries server with Windows clients. These will occasionally fail. I use IBM Director on my servers for monitoring purposes but the applications will just cease working without triggering events that Director can capture. I don’t like being in a position where my end-users tell me when things have failed.

Ideally I would have someone sitting constantly running queries on these applications so that when a problem occurs we are ahead of the game. However my CFO would not sign off the headcount and more to the point how do I keep this member of staff awake!

Does anyone know of an inexpensive tool that can be scripted to repetitively do this kind of thing and trigger an event when something out of the ordinary happens?