there are plenty of monitoring systems around, free and/or commercial, where you can have SMS/email/Web alerts and drill down etc. they're usually smart enough with regard to messaging, and can be setup to strike a balance between alerting you of a major problem and not becoming pesky.
i try to stay away from hand rolled solutions for both monitoring and automatically fixing stuff (yikes!)
otherwise you can get blamed for not only not attending to the problem (which you still have to fix), but now you also need to resolve the problem with the monitor/fix script. in other words, over-automation can cause more problems than it tries to fix.
anyway, that's my stance on it and you may not agree.
have fun sysadmining.

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