One way I've started using (thanks Dave B for the idea), is to get your process to log its pid when it starts (into a file or database table) and then remove that entry when it closes.

A little script starts every 10 minutes (either via cron or via a sleep command) and looks in the file/database for all the running processes. It then looks for those pids on the system using 'kill 0' tests. If it finds a pid in the list which isn't running it knows the process crashed.

For your purposes you may want this check script to run from cron so that it will reliably start every 'n' minutes.

The idea can be extended to support many jobs which you want to watch for failure. Hope this idea helps.

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