I set up monit, a utility for monitoring services on a Unix system. My concrete use case is a FreeBSD machine, that runs "N2N Edge", a Peer-to-peer (P2P) virtual private network (VPN) software. monit pretty much automates the "have you tried turning it off and on again?" process. Configurations like the following illustrate this:

check process myproc
        matching "myproc"
        start program = "/etc/init.d/myprocstart"
        stop program = "/usr/bin/killall myproc"
        if cpu usage > 95% for 10 cycles then restart

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