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Sorry, but those are terrible examples. If your processes keep crashing, you should find and fix the underlying problem, or if you're forced to use unstable software, rely on something like upstart or daemontools to keep it running. And if your apache logs regularly fill your disk, add them to logrotate.

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Sorry about the examples, the general idea is that you can execute a command on the server when there are alerts for a specific problem. Upstart and daemontools can't keep your processes running. For this specific task there are tools like Monit, God, Puppet to some extend

Perhaps a better example would be automating a previously manual failover, i.e. if a service becomes unavailable on one machine, start it on the warm standby. Or in EC2, terminate an instance and start a new one.

Upstart can indeed keep your process running. We use it for all of our process monitoring and it works like a charm.

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