At what frenquency does the monitor fail?  Is it every X minutes, or is it at random?  I had a SSH active script that would do the same thing at random intervals, and then work again.  It was complete random, and would fix itself after being down for a while.  To alevieate this, I created a performance monitor instead of an active monitor and then had alert center send out the action if the monitor went outside the threshold.

How many machines and monitors do you have running?

It happens at random times.

The monitors ssh into a box and check for the existance of a file.  Not sure how I could create these as performance monitors.

The ssh monitors are on only one server and there are 8 of them.

Tom,

The SSH performance monitor will only respond if a number is returned.  If you could code your script to return a 1 if the file is found you could use a performance monitor.  How long is your SSH script?  I found that if your script "wraps" in the text box that anything out of the box range will be included with the script output.  I had to write a shell script on my servers with a short name to get everything to fit in the text box and that fixed some of the issues for me.

You might try making a shell script on the server like the following and see if you get the correct output.

#!/bin/bash 
FILE=$1 
 
if [ -f $FILE ]; 
then 
   echo "0" 
else 
   echo "1" 
fi 


You could then have alarm center alert you if the monitor goes to 1.

hmm...not a bad idea.  I'll give it a shot.  Thanks!