# How to Monitor Amazon Web Services Uptime

> Amazon Web Services is a cloud computing platform offering compute, storage, database, and networking services.

*Source: https://monitoristic.com/monitor/aws*

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## Why Monitor Amazon Web Services?

AWS powers a significant portion of the internet. A regional outage can take down your servers, databases, CDN, and storage. AWS's own status page has historically been slow to update during major incidents.

## What to Monitor

- `your-app.com` — Your application's public endpoint
- `your-app.com/api/health` — Backend health check endpoint
- `your-app.com/api/status` — Service status endpoint

## What You Should Actually Do

1. Monitor your application externally — your monitoring should not run on the same infrastructure as your app
2. Monitor your health check endpoint — not aws.amazon.com, but YOUR application's public URL
3. Set up non-AWS alert channels — if your alerts go through SES and AWS email is down, you get nothing
4. Create a status page — your customers need a non-AWS-dependent place to check your status
5. Bookmark health.aws.amazon.com — but don't rely on it as your only signal

## Amazon Web Services's Official Status Page

Amazon Web Services publishes real-time status at https://health.aws.amazon.com. Your own monitor complements it by catching connection-level issues, often before the status page updates.

## Takeaway

The most dangerous thing about an AWS outage is that your monitoring might be on AWS too. If your app, your monitoring, your alerts, and your status page all run on the same infrastructure, a single outage makes you completely blind. External monitoring — checking your app from outside AWS — is the only way to know what your users see when things go wrong.

## Frequently Asked Questions

### How do I get notified when my AWS-hosted app goes down?

Set up an HTTP monitor for your public endpoint on Monitoristic. Since Monitoristic runs on independent infrastructure, it can detect when your AWS-hosted app is unreachable — even if AWS's own monitoring is also affected.

### Should I monitor aws.amazon.com?

No — monitor YOUR application's URL. AWS can have regional outages that only affect certain services in certain regions. Your app can be down while aws.amazon.com is perfectly healthy.

### Why not just use CloudWatch?

CloudWatch runs on AWS. During an AWS outage, CloudWatch can be delayed or unavailable. External monitoring gives you a view from outside — what your actual users see when they try to reach your app.

### How is this different from AWS Health Dashboard?

AWS Health Dashboard reports platform-wide service health. It's often slow to update during major incidents. Your external monitor checks YOUR specific endpoints and alerts you in seconds, not minutes.