Hello HomerJ,
You could monitor the ''HP Application Lifecycle Management'' service that runs on the ALM server. However I will tell you that this reporting is not aways accurate. It has the states of stopped and running, but these aren't always actually indicative of the current actual state of the service. I have witnessed many times where the service is stopped through the Services application and then restarted. However something is incorrect and the restart fails to complete correctly (such as the DB was unavailable or unreachable). The services reporting states it is running, however it doesn't reflect this correct status and remains in the running status even though the status is officaily stopped as the services failed to start correctly.
I am unaware of any service that could be monitored to correctly report the status and effectively notify the monitor that the service has failed to notify the admins to address the issue quicker than the users would. Also monitoring within the application will stop and not be able to notify or update when the services are frozen, not updating, or stopped, so they aren't always good monitoring apparatus either.
Hope this helps some but unfortunately I am unaware of anything that would help in this situation other than the possibilities suggested above.
Dan