This means that every service on your machine that listens to any exposed interface like e.g. 74.126.24.86 is NOT monitored by monit! So if you have a problem with your IP-setup or your firewall or you forgot to change ip addresses for virtual interfaces or anything else that happens in the real world, you will not get an alert!

So everywhere in this config example where there is localhost you should use your IP!

Even more tricky: monit assumes localhost, if “host” is not used, so a stanza like

if failed port 22 protocol ssh then restart

will just test if your ssh server runs on 127.0.0.1 - is this useful? Of course, if you are lucky, there is a good chance that if it runs on localhost it may also run on the IP you are connecting to your server. However, to be sure that it really does it should instead be written e.g.

if failed host 74.126.24.86 port 22 protocol ssh then restart

Nearly every tutorial I saw about monit propagates the same errors which leads to a nearly useless monit configuration - people should really read the monit manual before just copy-n-pasting random stuff from the internet: http://mmonit.com/monit/documentation/monit.html