I am familiar with SMF on Solaris. In particular, when a service cannot be started by SMF it is marked as being in maintenance state. I'm trying to use upstart to detect and report on similar conditions. My understanding of the way that Upstart works is that if a service fails then an event is emitted indicating the failure and the service is stopped. If you don't catch the event then you don't know it's failed. If a user queries the status of a service they only see that it is stopped; they don't see the reason. Am I right in thinking that once a service is stopped the only way to determine the cause is to view the system logs? Now it's easy to configure upstart to run a job when another process fails: start on stopped tongo RESULT=failed But as far as I can work out you would need to explicitly enumerate all the jobs that you wanted to monitor - or is there a wildcard option? start on stopped *ANY* RESULT=failed What about the case where a new service is added? Obviously I also want to be notified if that fails. Specific RTFM pointers would be welcomed. Thanks Dave