1. A method for use in providing improved fault tolerance in a computing system comprising at least one computing machine, the method comprising the steps of: executing a control program in conjunction with a fault tolerance software system running on the at least one computing machine; and initiating via the control program a test script program which sends one or more requests to a monitored program, wherein the test script program processes corresponding responses to the one or more requests, and generates at least one return value utilizable by the control program to indicate a failure condition in the monitored program.