It's not the way I would do it nowadays. Granted, long time ago, I build in paging/emailing into my applications, either directly or by using a module or library.

I no longer do. If an application has something to say, syslog is the way to go. The great thing about syslog is that it is centralized - this way I change who needs to be paged/emailed and with what frequency without having to reconfigure any application. I don't have to restart applications, and it's hard to forget one. From /etc/syslog.conf, I can decide which messages are to be send into a named pipe, and at the other end, I can have a program doing the messaging.