I don't understand why #Rackspace (and other cloud providers) don't have an option for "send me a text message if one of my servers goes down." I keep finding out about it situationally.
@GenghisKen you can create monitoring checks via the cloud panel, as long as you've installed their monitoring agent. Options include ping or HTTP url checks, and you can even do things like a HTTP url check with a subsequent response content check, and then write a quick PHP script or something at that url, to return different responses if say... it can't connect to a database or something.