Can I use AWS CloudWatch to hit a status URI?

Question

Is it possible to use CloudWatch or other AWS services to hit a URI, e.g. www.mysite.com/status, and send me error alerts when that doesn't return a 200 result? I want service-level monitoring for a small site (and don't want to do any work).

Ideally, I'd like to hit the /status endpoint on a particular EC2 host, with the HTTP hostname parameter set.

Thanks in advance.

edit: I recall something similar is available in auto-scaling groups, where hosts are automatically taken down if they don't meet health checks. I'm looking for something similar, but I just want email, not hosts taken down. (Since I'm working on small sites on a shared host.)

Answer 1

You can't do it directly from CloudWatch, but you could set up a monitor on a separate server, construct the test, and then send a custom metric to CloudWatch using the CLI tools. Custom metrics (and the CloudWatch CLI) are covered here:

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/DeveloperGuide/publishingMetrics.html

From a separate server you could then run a simple script which tries to load your health page, and sends 0 for healthy, 1 for unhealthy, or whatever works for you, to CloudWatch.

Answer 2

Doing this with CloudWatch and SNS is not straightforward. You could do it with Route 53 and DNS failover, but for what you need, have a look at Pingdom. They have a free plan somewhere if you search for it.