Here's a scenario: I have two processes - an application and a watchdog. The watchdog exercises the application (instead of just checking its presence). If the watchdog sees that the application health is poor, I want the application to be restarted. So inside the watchdog when it sees bad health it will run "initctl emit application-unhealthy" and stop exercising. But when the application is stopped, I also want the watchdog to be stopped, so that the watchdog gets restarted in a clean state after the application gets started, and the watchdog doesn't try to exercise the application that isn't there. So here are the config files I put in /etc/init: application.conf:         start on startup or application-kickstart         stop on application-unhealthy         exec /home/marcelk/application         respawn watchdog.conf:         start on started application         stop on stopping application         exec /home/marcelk/watchdog         respawn On boot both the application and watchdog start. If I "initctl emit application-unhealthy" then only the application stops, not the watchdog. I did a "initctl log-level debug" before the "initctl emit application-unhealthy" and it says it is completing the stopping and stopped events for application, but there is no reference to watchdog. Am I correct to understand that this should work as I expect? Another option would be for the watchdog to explicitly invoke "initctl restart application" and for the watchdog itself to stay up during the application restart. Would that initctl invocation block until the application was stopped and restarted? What would be nice is a "restart on ..." stanza. I could also see that an "restart limit ..." stanza should follow. Given the way that upstart was designed, any other models I should look at for an elegant application/watchdog functionality? Thanks!