I worked on a similar project for a while, but I found monit and scrapped my code. monit is pretty easy to set up, can do all sorts of smart things like restart a process up to n times, and then call for help. You can set up arbitrary tests for to verify process responses. It does alerts as well as process monitoring and management.

By selecting the appropriate compilation options, you can even keep monit very lean. For example, I was able to use it on a project targeted for ARM based system with 64 MB RAM and still have plenty of room for a couple of Perl daemon processes.

In short, monit >= sliced bread.