Yeah, exactly. I have not looked at the app described in the article, but daemontools is a set of programs that let you manage persistent processes. "supervise <directory>" will run a script called "run" in <directory>, restarting it if it fails. It also keeps status information around, so you can run "svstat <directory>" to check to status, "svc -d <directory>" to kill it, etc.

On top of that is svscan, which will look for service directories in a directory, and will start a supervise instance for each. It will also start a supervise instance for <directory>/log if it exists, piping the output of the supervised script to the logging process.

In this way, you just need to write a service that writes log messages to stdout, and it will handle log rotation and process management. It's really a nice system, although apparently rather unpopular. I guess it's more fun to write your own logging and daemonization code, rather than let a very small C program that has existed unchanged for 10 years do it. Or something.

Erlang has heart (http://www.erlang.org/doc/man/heart.html) for similar reasons. Of course, it also has distribution, for when the whole computer it's running on dies.

I use runit (http://smarden.org/runit/) instead of daemontools (same sort of thing, but a bit less opinionated about e.g. where it gets installed). Rather than expecting every daemon to implement its own supervisor, logging system, etc. correctly, just use one of those.