What are the advantages of a monitor server for log shipping

Question

I'm researching and implementing log shipping as part of disaster recovery for our SQL server. I've seen that a monitor server is recommended (but not required) for monitoring the log shipping process. What is the advantage of having that monitor server? Is it the only way to view the history of the log shipping process? Is it useful to have in case one of the servers goes down so you can get some data on what happened?