How to monitor a hung process

The best way to monitor against processes that are still up but are not actually doing the thing they are supposed to is to come up with some way to test that resulting action directly.  So if the process was w3wpe.exe i would have to set up an http monitor against the address it is supposed to be serving up.  If the process was SolarWinds.InformationService.ServiceV3.exe i would have to write up a script to connect to the solarwinds information service to run a quick transaction.

So the question is, what does your process do, and is there some way you can validate that beyond just knowing that the process exists in the task mananger?