Simple way of restarting crashed processes?
I'd look in to daemontools (http://cr.yp.to/daemontools.html).
Supervise was built for exactly this purpose -- to start processes and watch them, restarting them immediately if they ever terminate.
You could still use monit if you need to do anything more complicated than a simple "is it still running" check, and if the process needs to be restarted, then do that through supervise.
You could also use /etc/inittab to restart dead processes using the respawn action.
See inittab section on http://aplawrence.com/Unixart/startup.html