Well I am not sure it is 100% applicable to your situation, but you might want to check out Monit. It is what I like to call a gigantic if/then statement. Basically it is a program that will watch just about anything (a process, a file, a directory, a port, etc.) and will do something if anything changes about said watched "thing."

For instance, you have a daemon running (say sshd) and you want to make sure it keeps running - monit will periodically check that it is still running. If it goes down it can mail you and/or restart the daemon for you, or do just about anything else you want it to.

Maybe you need to keep an eye on a config file (like httpd.conf) so that if it changes you can restart a daemon automatically to make the changes live (like apache) - monit will do this for you.

Sorry if this sounds like a plug, but it is a nice program. Hope this helps.

-Shane