Thanks for your detailed response Hard Knox, much appreciated.
I do like your process monitor idea for getting it to display in a useful column set - I hate the way K dumps everything in 'Events' (K should allow you define column sets for events just like they do monitors). It would be a lot of work to do this for all event log types, but I might set it up just for backups and so other critical ones!
I also have a third monitor set which, is the same as the successful, but called 'missing successful', and I set this to alert if it doesn't see event ID 1120 in 3 days. Just in case a tech suspends a job and forgets to un-suspend it, etc.