Knowing if application is "alive"

I have 4 applications which are supposed to run 24/7. How can I make a
monitor application to know if they're running fine?

The best I can come up with is making them update a file/DB every X
amount of time and have the monitor app check that mark. If the mark
haven't updated then it means the program stopped. The programs do
their thing multithreaded so we don't have the problem of waiting for
the main thread to finish.

But this is so rustic that I think there's got to be a better way.
I'm hoping of something like sending an event over the network from the
running app to the monitor. This way the monitor will just sit there
listening to the other apps and if it stops receiving a message the
notify it.

.

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