Monitoring availability of a Adapter

We have a EJB Template based Custom Adapter.
We seldom into situations wherein the Adapter Connection could not come up and remains disabled. [For example, when there is a standard maintenance of the end system and in case the downtime extends beyond the normal window and if the IS is restarted during the while; Due to the unavailability of end resource, the Adapter looses its connectivity.

The end system is an external vendor system.

We would like to build some sort of monitoring in our System which would enable us to proactively manage this adapter and such failure situations.

Thanks in advance for the help.
-Rohit

Does the Adapter properties Min Connection was set to 0? It avoids any stale connections/end system downtime for maintenance once is back again and by setting to 0 should help some extent.

Just a thought!

HTH,
RMg