monline

I did bit of "googling" and found the following programs that are capable of the job ...

1. daemontools
2. launchtool
3. monit
4. restartd

All of them are capable of restarting failing daemons/services. Launchtool and restartd have less features/options and this might be a handicap for some ... or an advantage for others.

It might be worth to take a look at the changelog of these packages to see how up-to-date they are. Monit seems to be the most recent among them, but this does not mean anything ... eg. restartd can be perfect for you if you are looking only for the most basic functionality.

PS: actually you should not need these ... the "good" solution for crashes is to find the cause and fix it. However you might not have the chance to do so (either you don't have the source, the time or the permission) and you are forced to keep the buggy software up and running. In these cases a service-restarting software can come handy.