Monit can be used to great advantage to not only run daemons, but respond in the event of failure. See http://mmonit.com/monit/ for more details
With monit, you can monitor the running system, individual processes (services such as the web server, or database server, filesystems, or particular files and directories.
See http://www.stuartellis.eu/articles/monit/ Stuart Ellis' example configurations for inclusion in the KnowBox