Continuing on in their series of working with stand alone PHP scripts, DevShed has posted this third and last part looking at the creation of a basic script you can use to monitor your server (an excerpt from Advances PHP Programming by George Schlossnagle).

Last week, we continued our discussion of PHP standalone scripts with child processes and more. This week, we conclude our discussion and bring together what you've learned.

They start with the creation of a very basic daemon, including permission restrictions. They then modify this heavily to support the monitoring of processes through various parameters like frequency, status_time, and a description of the service. They then create the full example script and show the usage by checking to see if a URL passed in can be opened.

They also include, as a bonus, another more useful script that will email someone when the specified service goes down (still a HTTP check, though).