Monitoring that way can be interesting (use old versions too)... but running them anywhere near proximity to production machines may increase the risk of RCEs and resource exhaustion attacks. Though since you only need a yes/no from the monitoring it could be isolated without too much trouble.  If this were considered a best practice, though, it would further increase the barrier of entry for participation.

You are a lot more advanced than many Bitcoin using businesses: you actually report bugs and help test fixes. For many others, it's remarkable if they do anything more than call out to a bc.i api. Someone on IRC was pointing out the rather disappointing number of bitcoin sites that were currently managing to expose the bitcoind rpc to the public internet.