[monit] how to specify this tricky situation

[David Blank-Edelman]

Hi-

I've been really happy with monit and appreciate all of the hard work  
put into it. I recently encountered a scenario for which I can't seem  
to find an elegant approach. I'm wondering if you have any suggestions  
about the following:

I have a piece of software I am trying to monitor which consists of  
two daemons which I'll call "spam" and "proxy".

I want to check that two things are always true:
  1) is the SMTP service on port 25 (provided by "proxy") available
  2) is the process "spam" running as per its pid file

That's all very easy to do using monit. Here is where it gets more  
interesting.

I have three vendor-supplied scripts available to me:
  start-software
  stop-software
  restart-software (calls stop-software and then start-software)

start-software and stop-software always start and stop _both_ the  
daemons.

The place I am getting into trouble seems to be with the two stanzas  
of my config file fighting with each other. Let's say the "spam"  
process goes down. It attempts to restart, but this has the side  
effect of bringing down the proxy daemon and monit then attempts to  
correct the lack of SMTP service by, you guessed it, bringing down the  
spam process. And so on... The other part of this that I think is  
biting me is that at least part of the process is asynchronous and  
hence some of this corrective action is overlapping

Ideally I'd love to construct a single stanza that says (atomically)  
if either #1 or #2 is true, attempt a restart. I would think that I  
could use dependencies to help with this, but the problem is they are  
both (because of how they are started/stopped) dependent on each  
other. I also contemplated using the fact that both #1 and #2 could be  
put in the same group, but as far as I can tell groups aren't actually  
accessible from the config file (i.e. you can't say "restart group"  
from anything but the command line).

I know there are less great ways I could hack this like splitting out  
the the vendor-supplied scripts into scripts that deal with the  
individual daemons but I'd like to avoid that if I can (just to avoid  
problems when the vendor modifies the scripts).

Any ideas on an elegant way to handle this situation? Thanks in  
advance for any help you can offer.

     -- dNb