This post is older than a year. Consider some information might not be accurate anymore.
Monit allows start, stop and restart program instructions in process checks. If you restart with monit, no alarm or warning is triggered then. For instance you need to restart an application like logstash for configuration changes.
We have for example this control file
CHECK PROCESS logstash WITH MATCHING "logstash/runner.rb -f /etc/logstash\s"
start program = "/usr/bin/sudo /opt/logstash start" as uid "logstash" and gid "logstash"
stop program = "/usr/bin/sudo /opt/logstash stop" as uid "logstash" and gid "logstash"
if failed port 5400 type tcpssl then alert
alert mapper-king@cinhtau.net but not on { action, instance }
GROUP logstash
To restart the application without monit alert. If you restart logstash otherwise, it will generate an alert, since monit monitors it. 
sudo monit restart logstash
You can access the start and stop instructions in other sections, if they depend on the process. For instance stop logstash if the condition is given. You can also use restart, which will just use stop and start.
CHECK PROCESS logstash WITH MATCHING "logstash/runner.rb -f /etc/logstash\s"
start program = "/usr/bin/sudo /opt/logstash start" as uid "logstash" and gid "logstash"
stop program = "/usr/bin/sudo /opt/logstash stop" as uid "logstash" and gid "logstash"
depends on logstash_logfile
if failed port 5400 type tcpssl then alert
alert mapper-king@cinhtau.net but not on { action, instance }
GROUP logstash
CHECK FILE logstash_logfile with path /var/log/logstash/logstash-plain.log
if match "IllegalArgumentException" for 5 times within 5 cycles then stop
GROUP logstash
For more information look at the official manual.
