I think you are missing my point. This is precisely what I do not want to do. The last bit here, I mean - i.e. I'm asking for a way to set up so the "rename /etc/monit.d/sshd.conf to something different" step won't be necessary.
Depending on how much effort you are willing to put into this, you can get nagios to do this. There are two options:
1) Create a custom plugin that checks "service [app] status" or directly check the pid file and pgrep/grep for the app.
2) Write a small script that you stick into the service init script that tells nagios to start or stop monitoring a service. I used perl and LWP to do something very similar but you can probably find another CPAN module or something similar to act as interface to nagios.
If you are comfortable with scripting and nagios you can bang out a solution in an afternoon. Option 1 you can probably do in less than an hour and is probably better for you.
--------------------------------- Geoff Galitz Blankenheim NRW, Germany http://www.galitz.org/ http://german-way.com/blog/