An implementation of a technology, described herein, for remotely and dynamically monitoring the availability of the members of a load-balancing cluster. An implementation of the claimed invention includes a dynamic, exocluster application-layer monitor for dynamically monitoring and dynamically controlling the members of a load-balancing cluster. It may actively control the members that it monitors. The exocluster monitor is protocol agnostic. It dynamically adjusts so that it can monitor all of the members of the cluster as members are added and removed. This abstract itself is not intended to limit the scope of this patent. The scope of the present invention is pointed out in the appending claims.