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If you're only monitoring user-facing symptoms, and the application restarts quickly enough to not cause a blip in service, then:

a) It's highly likely that your monitoring is not going to spot an occasionally restarting service

b) It's probably a good choice not to waste cycles on that sort of monitoring

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Both of your assumptions are completely incorrect. One should _never_ "monitor" a system like that. Fortunately, the wise Unix wizzards of yesteryear already thought of the solution: uptime counters.

An uptime counter counts the number of milliseconds a process is alive. So if it resets to a value lower than the previous recorded one, it's a blue star thats impossible to miss.

Eh, just boot time is better one, doesn't change so it doesn't eat that many bytes in whatever TSDB you use

TSDBs don't work like that. They generally will choose to store a slope, not absolute values. They're very efficient at storing tons of data like this.

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