ah Novell, I should have guessed :)

I mostly use Webmins "System and Server Status" on those systems where I have it available. As a plus, it also send customizabloe Mails when a critical service ist down.

If you are writing to /var/log/messages, it would be "cleaner" to use logger.

If the service to be restarted supports the "status" function, I have found that using it (and grepping its output), instead of using ps+grep leads to fewer false positives. It also respects the logic that the application has for determining whether or not it is running. of course, the app could be retarded. in this case, i usually use pidof, instead of ps, since, for me, ps also leads to more false positives.

If you do not want to rely on cron, you can always stick an entry in inittab, but that is probably overkill.