We've debated this a few times - who watches host failures? I think we should do something like have a small systemd unit machine-config-daemon-host-monitor.service which watches systemd and if any unit fails, does a POST to the MCS.
Yes this implies a MCS write endpoint, not just read. We could start by just dumping the data into the pod logs.
This is also related to coreos/ignition#585 which we'd also want a MCS endpoint for.