daemon jobs and status

[moodysma sma]

Hi,

I've read about the BUILD_ID environment variable and how to use it when starting say a daemon job like a webserver.  That's fine and the build works, and a process gets spawnsed.  My question is, what are the best practices to see if that daemon is running correctly?  Do I continuously check for log file timestamps, do I modify the daemon to write a success environment variable?  I would rather not change the job.  Any suggestions?

Thanks