On one server, windows environment it might be hard to do. In our early days we wrote a process on another box that dropped a dummy file regularly. The process then waited before checking the status of the dropped file.
If the file was still in the drop folder an alert was raised otherwise an event map had cleaned it up.
Today we have tools that monitor the status of various services on multiple machines. We're also moving away from the event server to another tool that can manage all events, DSTX or not, on multiple platforms.