LGTM, I think this is the right thing to do.

The phd user has /bin/false as it's shell on our production instance, and it seems to work fine.

Hmm, this is pretty interesting. There was a configuration change right at the time of impact:

Yeah, I'm familiar with monit, and I think it will work decently well for this situation. Unfortunately, the current environment standardized on daemontools instead of monit.

@epriestley thanks for the feedback. I've read through the new docs, and I think have a section explaining phd-daemon, and incorporating some of the notes from T4181 (about setting a startup script for your OS) could be really useful.

I'm told that Stripe has signed the CLA, but for some reason I'm not being associated with that signing. Any idea how to fix?

Hey @eadler, thanks for looking into this. I feel this ticket is different from T4181. The former covers starting phd at boot, this ticket covers using process supervisors (like daemontools) which monitor processes on an ongoing basis.