Brilliant post and brilliantly timed for me as I've been thinking about ways to expand my own operations test suite into the realm of web service behavior. To

Brilliant post and brilliantly timed for me as I've been thinking about ways to expand my own operations test suite into the realm of web service behavior. To address the folks who say just use Nagios, well I say use the right tool for the job and the right tool for your existing processes. For some environments and tasks Nagios is a great choice. For others a scripted Rspec style solution is more appropriate. And for still others (like mine) a combination of a traditional monitoring system with some scripted TDD-style tests (which can also tie into the central monitoring agent, btw) is the right solution.