Hi Mike
Picking up on your comment on running sp_sysmon without sa permissions, I wanted to point out a feature in 15.7 (I know you are not using this at the moment) that makes it easy to run system procedures without system roles.
From 15.7 ESD2 , there is a feature to address this called execute as owner. From that version, most system procedures are created with execute as owner, so you can grant execute to a non-privileged user on a (system) procedure :
(this assumes valid login and user added to sybsystemprocs)
grant execute on sp_sysmon to my_user
go
sp_displaylogin test1
go
-- no roles displayed
Log in as test1, execute sp_sysmon and it works.
For earlier versions, there is this solution but of course this requires sa_role to set it up :
http://www.sypron.nl/grant_sa.html
HTH
Bart